Violent Natures: Colonial Wounds and Black Resistance in Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to the Native Land
Abstract
This paper examines how Aimé Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to the Native Land transforms natural landscapes into sites of colonial memory and Black resistance. By tracing the landscapes of the morne, the sea, and sugarcane, the paper shows how Césaire uses poetic
language to turn nature into both a record of violence and a ground for cultural rebirth. Nature becomes a medium through which Black subjectivity survives, resists, and begins to imagine new futures.
language to turn nature into both a record of violence and a ground for cultural rebirth. Nature becomes a medium through which Black subjectivity survives, resists, and begins to imagine new futures.
Keywords
Aimé Césaire; Notebook of a Return to the Native Land; Colonial Iandscapes
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[1] Césaire, Aimé. Notebook of a Return to the Native Land. Translated by Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith, Wesleyan University
Press, 2001.
[2] Dayan, Joan. “The Figure of Negation: Some Thoughts on a Landscape by Césaire.” The French Review, vol. 56, no. 3, 1983, pp. 411-
423.
[3] Friedman, Susan Stanford. “Modernism in a Transnational Landscape: Spatial Poetics, Postcolonialism, and Gender in Césaire’s Notebook and Cha’s Dictée.” Modernism/Modernity, vol. 10, no. 3, 2003, pp. 39-74.
[4] Prieto, Eric. “The Poetics of Place, the Rhetoric of Authenticity, and Aimé Césaire’s d’unretour au pays natal.” Dalhousie French Studies, Summer 2001, Vol. 55 (Summer 2001), pp. 142-151.
[5] Waggoner, Matt. “How to See an Island.” Angelaki, 29:6, 98-117.
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.70711/rcha.v3i4.7310
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