by Aimé Césaire

And by the sun installing a power and eagle factory under my skin
and by the wind elaborating the passes it knows best over my power of tooth of salt
and by the black rising along my muscles in sweet sap-like effronteries
and by the woman stretched out like a mountain unsealed and sucked by lianas
the woman with the little known cadastre where day and night play mora for springhead waters and
rare metals
and by the fire of the woman in which I look for the path to ferns and to Fouta Jallon
and by the closed woman opening on nostalgia

I HAIL YOU

Guinea whose rains from the curdled height of volcanoes shatter a sacrifice of cows for a thousand
hungers and thirsts of denatured children
Guinea from your cry from your hand from your patience
we still have some arbitrary lands
and when they have me, killed in Ophir perhaps and silenced for good,
out of my teeth out of my skin let the make
a fetish a ferocious guardian against the evil eye
as your solstice shakes me strikes me and devours me
at each one of your steps Guinea
silenced in myself with the astral depth of medusas

from The Collected Poetry of Aimé Césaire, translater by Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith.

Aimé Césaire, the prominent Martinique poet and anticolonialist politician, died on April 18, 2008 at the age of 94.

Simon Gikandi writes:

Initially I was tempted to pick Césaire’s “elegy” as an appropriate gesture of passing, but then it occurred to me that an ode might be more appropriate for a couple of reasons: One, after the powerful and painful, self-inflicted suffering through the what Fanon famously called the lived condition of blackness in the Cahier, Césaire sought to construct a space of exaltation, one in which the colonial self could imagine itself to be at home in the world. Slaves in the Caribbean used to say that when they died they would eventually go back to Guinea; in this ode Césaire had imagined the poetic home to which he would return when the passage through the landscape of modernity was completed. Second, I have always been intrigued by Césaire’s relationship to Senghor: they are certainly very different poets, but in the for of the ode they often seem to
converge. In this particular poem, Césaire’s “Guinea” universalizes Senghor’s very specific geography. I’m intrigued by the translation of Senghor’s specific ethnos (located in the cultures of the Fouta Jallon) into the register of global blackness and the challenges involved in this translation.

by Gwendolyn Brooks
For Dudley Randall

Original.
Hence ragged-round,
Hence rich-robust.

He had the hawk-man’s eyes.
We gasped. We saw the maleness.
The maleness raking out and making guttural the air
And pushing us to walls.

And in a soft and fundamental hour
A sorcery devout and vertical
Beguiled the world.

He opened us —
Who was a key.

Who was a man.

***

Greg Londe writes: I’ve been trying to think lately about elegies on public/political figures in the 20th century. Gwendolyn Brooks’s “Malcolm X,” her slippery and conflicted elegy (or is it an elegy?) for Malcolm X is not perhaps one of her greatest poems, but it is one that registers her quicksilver ability to praise and lament simultaneously, in lines at once harrowing and delicate. The poem appeared (well after X’s assassination on 21 Feb 1965) in Brooks’s book In the Mecca (1968) and is given pride of place as the first poem in Broadside Press’s anthology For Malcolm: Poems on the Life and Death of Malcolm X (1969, edited by Margaret Burroughs and the poem’s dedicatee/BP founder, Dudley Randall).

It is also a poem that seems to be reflecting on, and perhaps trying to find a voice both within and outside of, the formal and cultural transitions effected by X’s death, from which shocking moment followed Leroi Jones’s transformation into Amiri Baraka, the move uptown, and the establishment of the Black Arts Movement (for which Brooks would become an overdetermined mother figure and icon). The phrase “pushing us to walls” may recall Amiri Baraka’s poem “Black People”, which includes the infamous section, eventually used as evidence against Baraka in court, “you can’t steal nothin from a/ white man, he’s already stole it he owes you anything you want,/ even his life. All the stores will open if you will say the magic/ words. The magic words are: Up against the wall mother fucker/ this is a stick up!” In her autobiography, Brooks recalls seeing Baraka perform the poem at the Fisk Writers Conference in 1967: “I was sitting beside a youngish white fellow. He had b
een very quiet. But when Baraka said at one point, ‘Up against the wall!’ this man jumped to his feet and said ‘Yeah, yeah, kill ’em!’ And here he was was, ordering his own execution.”

It may be harder in this forum to discuss such a markedly occasional work. So does this poem work? What work is it doing or attempting to do? Can we compare its politicized iconography to the operations of the Clifton poems which we were just reading? On a purely sonic level, how does it elaborate, or overcome, or supersede its “origins”?

if i should
to Clark Kent

enter the darkest room
in my house and speak
with my own voice, at last,
about its awful furniture,
pulling apart the covering
over the dusty bodies: the randy
father, the husband holding ice
in his hand like a blessing,
the mother bleeding into herself
and the small imploding girl,
i say if i should walk into
that web, who will come flying
after me, leaping tall buildings?
you?

from The Book of Light (1993)

a song of mary

somewhere it being yesterday.
i a maiden in my mother’s house.
the animals silent outside.
is morning.
princes sitting on thrones in the east
studying the incomprehensible heavens.
joseph carving a table somewhere
in another place.
i watching my mother.
i smiling an ordinary smile.

from Two-Headed Woman (1980)

***

Meredith Martin Writes:

Lucille Clifton is one of those poets who blew my mind when I was first reading poems as a young woman. My mentor at the time, poet Paulann Petersen, gave me Good Woman, a collection of her earlier books and a memoir. I had never read any voice like this, and it was a voice, in a way that I’ve since trained myself to think against. Her “homage” poems (“to my hips” especially) carried fierce feminist salvos — and humor. Hers was a world of sisters and mothers and women who had to make it on their own in a man’s world. Re-telling biblical tales alongside tales of “ordinary” women, I learned that the ordinary and extraordinary were almost always intertwined. She’s more interested in Clark Kent than Superman, and her Mary is a regular woman with some intense dreams. Her “two-headed woman” has “one face turned outward / one face / swiveling slowly in.” I see these poems as those two sides: the first giving us a sense of what happens when the gaze is fixed inward and the second teaching us something new, something ordinary, through a differently imagined perspective.