A Study Of Aimé Césaire’s Poetry:Space,Intertextuality And Transculturality

Nowadays,confrontation and integration between cultures are intensifying.The relationship between culture and literature is becoming more and more complicated.AiméCésaire,whose life and work are marked by a triple complexity,has been a typical case.Césaire is an important poet and playwright in the 20th-century Francophone literature history.As the father of Negritude,he is simultaneously the pioneer of French-speanking Negroafrican literature and the founder of Francophone literature in the Caribbean.He is a committed poet and a controversial politician.Césaire?s complicated identity gave rise to the hybrid cultural state in his work.And the Cesairean style,often considered as "abstruseness",has made it more difficult to understand his work.Yet it is exactly in this triple complexity that the unique values of Césaire?s creation reside.The way in which the relationship between culture and poetics is interpreted is therefore an asset for appreciating Cesairean work.Due to the founding role that Césaire played in several literatures,the sociohistorical studies of his poetry is often of constructive nature.By placing Césaire at the beginning of a literary history,the critic at the same time describes the aesthetic features of that literature by virtue of the Cesairean style.This type of study often emphasizes the relationship between the work and a single tradition,and thus does not pay enough attention to the internal cultural complexity of creation.On the other hand,the aesthetic analyzes of Cesairean poetry are gradually becoming aware of the cultural limits of the theoretical tools.If the dynamic imbalance between cultural areas in the poetry is neglected,there is always the risk of performing an ethnocentric analysis in the name of universality.The present work aims at conducting a study on the complicated interaction between the poetic act and the cultural demands of Césaire,based on the three key notions: space,intertextuality and transculturality.The ?space turn? that has taken place in literary studies has greatly expanded our perspectives.Geocentric approaches emphasize the way in which geographic space organizes imaginations.While literary theories take the metaphorical meaning of the term to emphasize the spatiality of a work.From this point of view,the complexity that one finds in Cesairean work can be supposed to result from fruitful exchanges between three different spaces: a material and referential space which conditions the physical residence of the poet,an imaginary space modeled progressively by the work of Césaire and a poetic space occupied by this work itself.To carry out an in-depth analysis,we then resort to the theory of intertextuality.Not only did the concept allow us to base our study on a solid reading of the text,but it also brought us a series of operational critical tools,including discourse analysis that addresses issues such as the context,the point of view and the subject of enunciation,as well as the rhetorical and metrical study,which examines poetic forms,semantic fields and stylistic devices.The advantage of this composite approach lies in its ability to harmonize the close reading of the text and a global understanding of the work.It thus promotes a more flexible interaction between macroscopic cultural concepts and microscopic poetic acts.Thus,the present study unfolds according to a spatial logic.It first seeks to understand the poetic creation of Césaire in an insular space,that of Martinique.But the Cesairean work quickly exceeds the limits of an island to reach a global scale.The second chapter discusses this cosmopolitan dimension that Césaire has shown through his thought and his poetry.Finally,our study ends with a return to the poetic space.It aims to explain what this poetic world was able to create in response to cultural constraints imposed from the outside.The first chapter studies the cultural appropriation strategies that Césaire carried out in the Antillean literary space.Césaire?s poetic creation begins with a double revolt against exoticism and against regionalism.He unveiled them as the imitation of French Romantic and Parnassian styles,whose impoverished description of the West Indies betrays only a distorted product born of the assimilation politics.Through intertextual readings of Césaire?s poems,respectively with extracts from the work of Saint-John Perse and of Lafcadio Hearn,we see more clearly the position of the Martinican poet.Unlike the diplomat of Guadeloupean origin,who takes refuge in a universal space within the French language,believing that the words,definitively cut off from their external links,can only produce their meaning in the poetic construction,Césaire always draws his poetic materials from the local landscape and folklores.However,in doing so,he approached the perspective of the journalist and folklorist Lafcadio Hearn,to ensure a critical retreat from these familiar images.We thus conclude an?internal but distanced? point of view of Césaire: while keeping the link between his poetic language and the local culture,he constantly tries to enrich its connotations in order to remove it from its everyday banality.The second chapter discusses Césaire?s global connections,especially through his understanding of Africa.A double solidarity with the maternal continent was founded by the poet.Vertically,he put African civilization at the origin of all the black men,thus creating an inevitably idealized and romantic image of Africa.But horizontally,he has located Africa among other black diasporas,those who share the same historical experience of slavery and colonization.This image of Africa is therefore very real and current.For two reasons,this pattern of double solidarity allowed the poet to come into contact with the world.First,this schema itself results from a fusion of the enunciations coming from various discursive fields.There is in his knowledge of Africa a German ethnological discourse,which is forged not only in front of Africa,its study object,but also in relation to France,considered as a competitive partner.In his struggle for the awakening of the black consciousness,Césaire resorted to an American representation of egalitarian France to unveil the pitfalls of assimilationist position.And the solidarity it has woven in the black world is not only cultural and historical,but also that of class,from which can be identified a discourse inspired by proletarian internationalism.The schema than gave birth to a new cartography of the world in Cesairean poetry,drawn with the use of a series of toponyms.The third chapter returns to the poetic world.Césaire created within his poetry a mythical space.For the poet,myth is both the essential component of a civilization and the ideal expression of poetry.Two important mythemes can be recovered from its creation.The first is a dismemberment and rebirth god.From the image of dismemberment,the poet made a figurative expression of the inexpressible suffering of the black man caused by slavery and colonization.And from that of the resurrection,a representation of the hope of emancipation.He gathered on the tour of this historical experience various representations in several mythologies(Greek,Egyptian,African and Creole),giving the episode a status similar to that of an archetype.The second is the eternal navigation.Césaire has transposed on the poetic navigation ? a classic metaphor of literary creation ? the historic voyage of a slave ship.He thus enriched this literary tradition with his own experience.The infinity of images and words in Aimé Césaire?s poetry has given the reader this feeling of finitude,not in time but in space.Under his pen,a word always refers to the outside world and to itself.And an image has its roots in concrete and historical experience,while constituting a figurative and symbolic expression.The proper meaning mingles with the figurative sense and the line between the outside and the inside of a poem gets blurred.This is probably one of the reasons why Césaire?s poetry is described as hermetic.The poetic act of Césaire is an adventure in language and in culture.It is at the same time rooted in its historical experience and an opening to the world space.This bidirectional adventure responds well to his vision of universality,which is nothing more than a deepening of the singularity.