AIMÉ CÉSAIRE AND ENRIQUE BUENAVENTURA

Abstract

This essay offers an initial exploration of connections between Césaire and Spanish-speaking authors and literary movements, including the vibrant culture of public performance that developed in Latin America in the 1960s, by exploring the largely unexamined influence on him of the Colombian director and playwright Enrique Buenaventura. First, I demonstrate how both Césaire and Buenaventura express their theatrical objectives in essays and interviews with the term “consciousness-raising” and its associated methods. For both Césaire and Buenaventura, theater must serve a social function, by awakening spectators from their own indifference and provoking them to take part in a revolutionary struggle against prolonged colonization and cultural dependency. In the staging of their plays, they seek to overturn the oppressive creator/consumer hierarchy—whereby the colonizer is the creator, and the colonized the consumer—that reinforces these forms of neo-colonialism. And both authors were greatly influenced by the primary inspirational figures for theater in Latin America: Paulo Freire, Augusto Boal, and Bertolt Brecht. Second, I compare the plays that each wrote and staged about the reign of Henri Christophe, the early nineteenth-century black king of Haiti, as a means of enacting these principles: Césaire's La Tragédie du Roi Christophe and Buenaventura's La Tragedia del Rey Christophe.

Keywords:

• Césaire
• Buenaventura
• Theater
• Christophe
• Brecht
• Colonialism

Notes

1 All translations from French to English are my own.

2 Although Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which lays out some of the basic precepts of his theories on literacy and education, was not published until 1970, the ideas articulated in this text were already exerting a tremendous influence on the production of plays in Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean, in the early 1960s.

3 “Le régime colonial est négation de l’acte: négation de la création. Dans la société coloniale, il n’y a pas seulement une hiérarchie maître et serviteur. Il y a aussi, implicite, une hiérarchie créateur et consommateur” (“L’homme” 116).

4 “Le créateur des valeurs culturelles, en bonne colonisation, c’est le colonisateur. Et le consommateur, c’est le colonisé” (117).

5 “[T]oute création, parce qu’elle est création, est participation à un combat libérateur. Or la création culturelle, précisément parce qu’elle est création, dérange. Elle bouleverse. Et d’abord la hiérarchie coloniale, car du colonisé consommateur, elle fait le créateur” (118).

6 “Oui, en définitive, c’est aux artistes, aux écrivains, aux hommes de culture, qu’il appartient […] de constituer ces grandes réserves de foi, ces grands silos de force où les peoples dans les moments critiques puisent le courage de s’assumer eux-mêmes et de forcer l’avenir” (119).

7 I have found only one other scholar who has made this connection: in the introduction to Buenaventura's Los Papeles del infierno y otros textos, Emilio Carballido writes that Césaire's text is an inferior copy of Buenaventura's (11).

8 His biography can be accessed through the following link: http://www.poche.be/saison1112/les_peres/cv_Daniel_Marcelin.pdf.

9 Accessed through: http://openlibrary.org/works/OL7255520W/Douta_Seck_ou_La_tragédie_du_Roi_Christophe.