![Sample our Language & Literature journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5941/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Language-Literature.jpg"})
Abstract
In February 1961, Patrice Lumumba, first prime minister of the independent Congo, was assassinated. This article analyzes the play written five years later by Martinican politician and poet Aimé Césaire about Lumumba’s short political life and sudden death, focusing on the ways in which Césaire recuperated the figure of Lumumba from hostile discourse and transformed him into a martyr, a “poet of action”. Césaire’s gesture, the article argues, is one of transnational anti-colonial solidarity.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank participants in the ACLA 2013 panel on “The Global South Atlantic” as well as readers of earlier drafts: Lydie Moudileno, Hosam Aboul-Ela, Margot Backus, Karen Fang and Cedric Tolliver.
Notes
1. Pan-African magazine produced in Paris by Franco-Tunisian editor Béchir Ben Yahmed.
2. A Season in the Congo was premiered in Brussels in 1966. The 1967 performance in Paris of a revised version (which became the definitive print version) shocked not only the European public, as documented by Césaire scholar Gregson Davis (Citation1997), but also patriotic Zaireans, who deemed the representation of Mobutu Sese Seko (disguised as “Mokutu” in the play) to be too negative (151).
3. The play was translated into English in 1968 by Ralph Manheim (Grove Press) and again in 2010 by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Seagull Books). I use the latter translation in this article.
4. For the original French speeches and writings of Lumumba, see La pensée politique de Patrice Lumumba (Citation1963; Lumumba Speaks, Citation1972); this is a collection of much of what Lumumba wrote between 1958 and his death, including the independence day speech (Citation1972, 220). For a comparison of the original Lumumba speech and Césaire’s version, see chapter 3 of L’humanisme dans le théâtre d’Aimé Césaire, by Rodney E. Harris (Citation1973).
5. In historical fact, Lumumba had not been scheduled to speak at all on 30 June 1960; in documentary footage, he can been seen scribbling during the first two (expected) speeches, and King Baudouin turns angrily to Congolese President Kasa-Vubu and Belgian Prime Minister Gaston Eyskens as Lumumba denounces the crimes of colonization and speaks to the Congolese people in terms of nationalist hope (see De Witte Citation2001, 2, 36; Zeilig Citation2008, 95–102; see also Raoul Peck’s Citation1990 documentary film, Lumumba: la mort du prophète).
6. André Breton, for instance, wrote in his preface to Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (1947), “here is a Black who wields the French language as no White today can wield it” (Breton in Césaire [Citation1939] Citation1983, 80). The paternalism and racism of Breton’s praise has been underlined by, among others, Fanon (1952, 31) in Peau noire, masques blancs.
7. For an excellent summary of Césaire’s attitudes toward departmentalization (his struggle for, defense of and later opposition to it), see Davis (Citation1997, 93–96).
8. A Season in the Congo takes the form of “non-naturalistic” (Conteh-Morgan Citation1994, 110) or “Brechtian” (Dunn Citation1980, 3) vignettes, scenes that follow a general chronological order but that diverge from it on occasion and that leave out many elements of Lumumba’s actual rule.
9. Susanne Brichaux-Houyoux identifies him as US ambassador Clare Timberlake (Citation1993, 261).
10. Here, and occasionally elsewhere, I have departed from Spivak’s translation to remain closer to the original.
11. Hammarskjöld, who was in reality to die mysteriously in a plane crash between the Congo and Katanga a mere eight months after Lumumba’s assassination, is portrayed by Césaire as sympathetic, if idealistic and naive. For an analysis of Hammarskjöld the Césairian character, complete with examination of a citation from the poet Saint-John Perse’s oeuvre that forms part of Hammarskjöld’s lines, see Roger Little (Citation1990).
12. Lumumba can hardly be called a poet in his own right, although he did publish a poem, “Weep, O Beloved Black Brother”, in his party’s newspaper, Indépendance, in September 1959 (Lumumba Citation1972, 114).
13. See Zeilig (Citation2008, 119); De Witte (Citation2001, 30); on the importance of the radio, see Heinz and Donnay (Citation1969).
14. The évolué (“evolved”) class was a term used under Belgian rule to refer to educated blacks. For a description of the humiliating process through which Congolese might attain the status of évolué, see Zeilig (Citation2008, 34).
15. Simon Kingambu (1889–1951) was an early nationalist and a prophet of the “Church of Jesus-Christ on Earth” (see Brichaux-Houyoux Citation1993, 264).
16. The Belgian premiere was very nearly cancelled because the authorities “contrived to stymie its production” (Davis Citation1997, 150).
17. For brilliant analyses of identity-based and political black solidarity in the context of the US, see Tommie Shelby (Citation2002, Citation2009).
18. The 1967 version of the play concludes with a scene taking place five years after Lumumba’s death, a scene during which Mokutu tries to draw on Lumumba’s continued popularity to validate his reign – only to have his soldiers fire on the overenthusiastic crowd, killing, among others, the Sanza player.
19. Most recently, at the time of writing, a seven-week run at London’s Young Vic theater in July–August 2013 and a three-week run at Villeurbanne’s Théâtre National Populaire in October 2013.