Césaire after Fanon. Returning to the “master-slave” revolt in Une tempête

Abstract

In his work, Fanon generously cites Césaire’s poetry. His citation from Césaire’s tragedy Et les chiens se taisaient in Peau noir masques blancs, and later in Les Damnés de la terre, in support of his argument that anti-colonial violence was essential to a new, post-revolutionary beginning, is of particular interest. I want to make the case that Une tempête presents us with a complexity of temporal and intertextual folds that pursues the question of freedom and what comes after. Fanon came after Césaire but Une tempête comes after Fanon. Césaire’s text, I argue, alludes to Fanon’s work in different ways and in doing so appears to assert the case for non-violence, refuses the figure a decolonial tableau rasa and returns us to the predicament of colonial racism that both he and Fanon sought to overcome. In all of this, is the figure of the hyphen—a ligature binding Prospero to his imagined self, that is constituted through Caliban, but also loosely binding Césaire to Fanon.

Keywords:

• Aimé Césaire
• Frantz Fanon
• Une tempête
• Caribbean Francophone Thought
• “Master-Slave”
• Revolution
• Non-violent Revolt

“Chaque génération doit dans une relative opacité découvrir sa mission, la remplir ou la trahir”

—Les Damnés de la terre (Fanon 2002 [1961], 197)

Successive generations of Francophone Caribbean intellectuals, artists and writers have worked on subverting, rupturing, and turning away from those patterns of French thought that have underpinned and shaped colonial structures. A line of contestation and assertion can be traced to form a cultural genealogy that seems chronologically neat, if not always linear, as it moves from Aimé Césaire to Frantz Fanon before descending along a patrilineal line to Édouard Glissant and then Patrick Chamoiseau and the writers (all male) of the Créolité movement. To what extent is it helpful to think of Caribbean intellectual production along these lines in terms of generations? Can “generational thinking” serve to further this body of work that has so brilliantly thought through the relationship between imperialism and slavery, colonizer and colonized, centre and periphery, independence and dependence, “Master” and “Slave”?

David Scott is keenly aware “of the temporality of generations, of experiences shaped by successive and overlapping locations within the passage of social time” (2014, 28) and asks how different generations respond to the same event, specifically that of the end of the Grenada Revolution on 19 October 1983. Scott is looking back and asking how the “figuring” out of the past within structures of nostalgia and melancholia can revive something in the present. Scott’s line of argument is that generations embody “successive intellectual and affective ways to assimilate or incorporate, the past in the present” (102). This approach to an event and to how it is remembered in the Anglophone Caribbean country of Grenada invites us to think of how Martinican thinkers and cultural producers have sought to “assimilate and incorporate” but also to radically think through the past and present traces of colonial thought as well as the thought of those who have gone before and come after in a genealogical line of tresses and knots. Each generation seeks to maintain and reinvent a critical position that can challenge the oppressive pervasiveness of colonial, racialized thought. Each generation seeks to offer a new dynamism to the exhausted efforts of anti-colonial critique.

Sylvia Wynter examines the work of Édouard Glissant from a perspective that takes such a generational genealogy into account. She starts with the assertion that Glissant’s work is “a new mode of revolt” and, as such, “takes part in a new uprising, together with the line of intellectual filiation specific to Martinique, from Aimé Césaire’s founding Negritude poem Cahier d’un retour au pays natal […] to Frantz Fanon’s epistemological break effected in Peau noire, masques blancs” (Wynter 1989, 639). Wynter adds a long, attenuating footnote where she comments that “Whereas from inside the Francophone literary tradition the comparative differences between Glissant and Césaire loom large, from the perspective of the Caribbean as a whole it is the similarities, the line of filiation, between Césaire, Fanon, and Glissant that stand out” and, developing the point, argues that Glissant’s concept of métissage is an “evolutionary variant” of Césaire’s négritude (646). She makes no further reference to Fanon. but the metaphor of filiation/evolution is maintained. Indeed, what is fascinating in Wynter’s astute study is the ambiguity of filiation. In the citations above filiation is an intellectual genealogy that she rightly identifies and as she develops her general argument, she makes the observation that Glissant seeks to counter the assimilation of the psyche (within a colonial structure) through the “counterconcept of métissage so as to contest the representation of monofiliation, of Genesis […] of ‘Man’” (639). Or, as Glissant would have it in the wake of his reading of Faulkner’s Absalom! Absalom!: ‘Il s’agit d’une perversion de la filiation originelle (celle du Dénombrement) : l’homme ici se perd et tourne dans la trace” (1997, 257). In Wynter’s article filiation is doubled: the intellectual genealogy or filiation of the Francophone Caribbean is a holding category that is similar to, yet distinct from, the critical tool of métissage that counters “la filiation originelle.” A filiation that returns us to one originating source through a line of certified descent is not Glissant’s notion of filiation. Glissant makes the case for the mixed line, the line of métissage that is one of diverse filiation.

Wynter’s starting point, above, is Glissant’s “new mode of revolt,” its participation in a “new uprising” that forms part of a Caribbean line of thinking on revolt and what it means. What then if we were to follow the logic of the unsettling of an originating filiation back into that of the Caribbean intellectual genealogy on revolt (amongst other things) in order to explore the uncertain, ambiguous and, at times, ambivalent relationship that links Césaire to Fanon and to do so not to so much to signal a difference marked by personality but a difference of approach to revolt in ways that inscribe variability and uncertainty? In doing this I want to adopt an intertextual approach examining, in the main, Fanon’s citation of Césaire’s tragedy Et les chiens se taisaient (1956b) in Les Damnés de la terre (1961) and, in turn, to draw upon this in reading Césaire’s play Une tempête (1969) as a commentary on anticolonial violence or revolt; a commentary, that reasserts, if tentatively, Césaire’s primary differences with Fanon on the question of revolution and its aftermath.

The relationship of thought between Césaire and Fanon is not straightforward, not one of simple succession, nor is it much documented. In his biography of Fanon, David Macey notes that Césaire said little about Fanon, commenting that the tribute to Fanon that Césaire published in Présence Africaine in 1972 “celebrates Fanon’s revolutionary virtues in an almost florid rhetoric, but gives little sense of any personal affection, or indeed of any great acquaintance with its subject” (2012, 68). However, Césaire wrote an earlier tribute or eulogy in December 1961 for Jeune Afrique; the piece, titled “La révolte de Frantz Fanon,” is one in which Césaire’s support and admiration for Fanon seem clear: “Et il est bien vrai que Fanon s’institua théoricien de la violence, la seule arme, pensait-il, du colonisé contre la barbarie colonialiste.” But here and further on, Césaire attenuates his framing of Fanon’s position on violence. He continues “Mais sa violence était, sans paradoxe, celle du non violent, je veux dire la violence de la justice, de la pureté, de l’intransigeance. Il faut qu’on le comprenne: sa révolte était éthique, et sa démarche de générosité.” Césaire seems to defend Fanon but the movement of his essay returns Fanon to the wider family of humanism¹: “J’insiste, nul n’était moins nihiliste, je veux dire moins gratuitement violent que Fanon. Comme ce violent était amour, ce révolutionnaire était humanisme” (Césaire 2011 [1961]). Césaire rightly affirms that Fanon did not promote violence for its own sake but in placing Fanon within the embrace of humanism, he bypasses the critical foundation of Fanonian violence, namely political praxis.² As Fanon makes clear in Les Damnés de la terre: “Le colonisé découvre le réel et le transforme dans le mouvement de sa praxis, dans l’exercice de la violence, dans son projet de libération” (2002 [1961], 59). For Fanon, the violence of revolt was to be directed and justified by a political objective, humanism and politically motivated violence were not incompatible.

Césaire’s rare, explicit engagement with Fanon (and only after his death) are in contrast with Fanon’s open, if conflicted, admiration for the brilliance of Césaire’s poetry and wider movement of négritude. James Williams’s biography of Fanon includes a chapter titled “Return to the Native Land: With and Against Césaire” that details Fanon’s enthusiasm for Césaire’s poetry and crucially observes that “the very fact that the two never met as teacher/mentor and pupil would also allow Fanon to take a more critical stance towards Césaire when necessary” (2023, 41). However, Fanon’s political views contrasted with those of Césaire which, claims Williams, Fanon judged “to be compromised and defeatist owing to his integrationist convictions, which commended the assimilation of Martinique into France rather than taking a stand for national independence” (42).

And yet in thinking about violence and revolt, Fanon returns to Césaire in a way that is unambiguously enthusiastic in Les Damnés de la terre. In the opening chapter, “De la violence,” written at a time of Algeria’s anti-colonial, nationalist revolution, Fanon includes a long passage from Césaire’s play Et les chiens se taisaient (1956b).³ Published in 1956, its subject matter is that of the Haitian Revolution, and its leader Toussaint L’Ouverture is inscribed within a tragic historical drama. Fanon cites at length the dialogue between Le Rebelle and La Mère where the former gives an account of his confrontation with his master. Fanon introduces the citation writing that “La poésie de Césaire prend dans la perspective précise de la violence une signification prophétique” (2002, 83). He then states “Il est bon de rappeler l’une des pages les plus décisives de sa tragédie où le Rebelle (tiens !) s’explique” before quoting directly from Et les chiens se taisaient and finishing with:

LE REBELLE

[…] Il n’y a pas dans le monde un pauvre type lynché, un pauvre homme torturé, en qui je ne sois assassiné et humilié. […]

Alors ce fut l’assaut donné à la maison du maître

On tirait des fenêtres.

Nous forçâmes les portes.

La chambre du maître était grande ouverte. La chambre du maître était brillamment éclairée, et le maître était très calme… et les nôtres s’arrêtèrent… c’était le maître… J’entrai. C’est toi, me dit-il, très calme… C’était moi, c’était bien moi, lui disais-je, le bon esclave, le fidèle esclave, l’esclave esclave, et soudain ses yeux furent deux revets apeurés les jours de pluie… je frappai, le sang gicla : c’est le seul baptême dont je me souvienne aujourd’hui. (Fanon 2002, 83–85)

At the end of the citation Fanon comments that the scene is one in which “La violence du régime colonial et la contre-violence du colonisé s’équilibrent et se répondent dans une homogénéité réciproque extraordinaire” (85). Note that Fanon cited the same passage (i.e. the final confrontation between rebel and master) in Peau noire masques blancs but beneath it added a further citation from Césaire’s Et les chiens se taisaient: “Par une inattendue et bienfaisant révolution intérieure, il honorait maintenant ses laideurs repoussantes” (Fanon 1952, 161). This shift from a “révolution intérieure” in Peau noire to the reciprocated, material violence of Les Damnés is significant. Fanon’s admiration for Césaire’s poetry is, in Les Damnés, matched by its fit with Fanon’s view on the need to confront colonial violence with anti-colonial violence.⁴ Here the Master-Slave dialectic is material and bloody. The slave kills the master and, in advance of the act he knows he will commit, the slave casts aside the identity within which the master imprisoned him—“c’était bien moi, lui disais-je, le bon esclave, le fidèle”—and it is that moment of insight that the master detects, that use of the imperfect past, which provokes his fear. This extended use of Césaire’s tragedy Et les chiens se taisaient—Fanon is using the version published at the end of Les Armes miraculeuses—in the key opening chapter of Les Damnés de la terre was published in the same year as Césaire’s eulogy (cited above) for Fanon which so explicitly highlights his humanism. Again, there’s no contradiction here. Not really. But Fanon does draw Césaire’s work into an argument for revolutionary violence and Césaire does return Fanon to the humanism that was fundamental to Césaire. But did Césaire go further in his engagement with Fanon when he wrote Une tempête some years later? Had he by then read Les Damnés de la terre and wrote a reply that might reassert his difference in ways that confirm Hiddleston’s view that “Césaire […] accords his poetry and drama revolutionary potential through his commitment to a concept of a relational humanist ethics” (Hiddleston 2021 [2014], 105)?

Returning to Césaire’s eulogy and its attenuating portrait of a revolutionary Fanon, I want to speculatively read it into a more sustained conversation that takes place within Une tempête. Wilder reads Fanon’s Peau noire, masques blancs as a re-writing of Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal “that does not only reproduce the latter’s way of exploring the double binds created by colonial racism but also reaches the same impasse as its predecessor” (2004, 34). I want to read Une tempête as a gloss on the opening chapter of Les Damnés de la terre, and possibly a corrective that re-asserts non-violence, refuses the figure of a decolonial tabula rasa and returns us to the work of dismantling colonial racism that both he and Fanon saw as a work that remained to be done by future generations. Implicitly, Césaire returns to the Hegelian dialectical encounter, the Master-Slave confrontation that occurs in both his work and in Fanon’s where, in addition, he incorporates Césaire’s mise-en-scène of the encounter. In short, and borrowing from Wilder, I will argue that Césaire’s radicality of insight in Une tempête affirms “Freedom” over Fanon’s radical literalism of revolutionary violence (Wilder 2015, 8).

Une tempête is an adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1611) and was first performed at the Festival d’Hammamet in Tunisia in 1969, by a black theatre troupe eight years after the publication of Fanon’s Les Damnés de la terre, which, as we know, was mainly written in Tunis.⁵ In Freedom Time, Wilder refers to the four plays Césaire wrote between 1956 and 1969 in the following terms: “And whereas The Dogs and A Tempest represent acts of anticolonial revolt, the plays about Christophe and Lumumba focus on the drama of decolonization, the problem of freedom after emancipation” (2015, 201). Wilder is right to describe Une tempête as representing anticolonial revolt yet in his focus on “freedom after emancipation” he says nothing further about Une tempête, in particular about how the differences between Ariel and Caliban on the question of revolt and emancipation might shape the freedom that comes after. Wilder’s attention is drawn to the two other plays (as above), yet the drama of decolonization is also foreshadowed in Une tempête: it presents us with a complexity of temporal and spatial folds that provide a non-place, a dystopic utopia, within which the question of freedom as constituent of what comes after is played out.

Une tempête is about forms of revolt and the assertion of the struggle for freedom. The drama confronts Prospero (Colonizer, Master) and Caliban (Colonized and Slave) along with Ariel, also a slave and apparently compliant. The paratextual pointers are relevant to our reading as, from the very outset, Césaire appears to evoke Fanon’s work. Une tempête, we read, is “d’après La Tempête de Shakespeare. Adaptation pour un théâtre nègre.” Césaire then identifies the list of characters as “Ceux de Shakespeare.” Prospero is not named nor is Alonso, the King of Naples; Antonio, the usurping Duke of Milan or their entourage which includes servants, Stephano and Trinculo. Césaire then adds “deux précisions supplémentaires.” Ariel is identified as a slave “ethniquement un mulâtre” and Caliban is identified as an “esclave nègre.” He makes one addition, Eshu, who is a “dieu-diable nègre,” a force of chaos and disruption. The final instruction relates to the mood of the play to come: “Atmosphère de psychodrame. Les acteurs entrent les uns après les autres et chacun choisit un masque à sa convenance” (Césaire 1969, 7). The introduction of Eshu (Èṣù is a Yoruba divinity of mischief and of order) and the choice of masks suggests the resources of négritude but also echoes Fanon. In its first performance, or ideal performance thereafter, we see black actors take up masks which, in the main, are of white characters. And this within an atmosphere of a psychodrama—the acting out of traumas from the past—which strongly resonates with Fanon’s emphasis on psychopathology and Freudian analysis in Peau noire masques blancs.

The action itself begins with a prologue. Le Meneur de Jeu invites the actors to choose their mask and character. Chapman comments that the “play’s mask-choosing prologue suggests identity is never fully fixed […]. All boundaries are porous” (2016, 736). By echo, we could add from Fanon’s Peau noire masques blancs, “Le nègre n’est pas. Pas plus que le Blanc” (Fanon 1952, 187) and also suggest that Césaire doubles down on this when he writes “A chacun son personnage et à chaque personnage son masque” (1969, 9). “Personnage” comes from the Latin “persona” meaning mask which eventually came to denote the character as such. Césaire plays on the meaning of “mask,” the role of chance as well as existential decision, in the assumption of identity: “Toi, Prospero? Pourquoi pas ? […] Toi, Caliban ? Tiens, tiens, c’est révélateur !” (9). The relationship between mask and character is determined partly by chance—the whim of the actor’s decision—but also by existential agency rather than predetermined and, as such, unchanging. The mask can be taken off. This speculative reading is prompted by the argument that Césaire is reading Fanon’s work through a critical, though not adversarial, optic. I want to pursue this into an analysis of the play.

While the central axis of the play is the confrontation between Prospero and Caliban, the relationship between Ariel and Caliban allows for an intriguing triangulation. Dialogue between Caliban and Ariel in Act 2 Scene 1 brings their differences to the fore but also their fraternal respect for each other’s view. Ariel follows the path of appeasement or pacifism (he does Prospero’s bidding) while also seeking freedom by appealing to Prospero’s conscience. In this dialogue, Caliban believes that freedom can only be obtained through violence. Césaire invites us to read Caliban as Malcom X—“Appelle-moi X” Caliban tells Prospero (1969, 28). This then is a colonial world but it is also one that reflects on a decade or more of civil rights and the legacy of slavery after emancipation in the US.

Une tempête’s portrayal of Prospero suggests that the Colonizer’s identity is formed through his difference from, and control over, the Colonized. For much of the play this is a given and it is ideologically internalized by Prospero in Act III where Prospero/ (the older man?), in response to Caliban’s resistance, says “Qui est-ce qui commande ici ? Toi ou moi ?” (Césaire 1969, 5). The relationship is, at this point, predicated upon the asymmetrical distribution of colonial power and is cast within ideologically embedded images of both Master and Slave that justifies the inequality. Prospero commands but his authority is vested not in a legitimacy sanctioned by consent but in his control of the magic arts and his use, or threat, of la trique, or stick (27). Prospero’s question of who commands suggests that to him the question is rhetorical and the answer self-evident. The “natural” order of the world is a construction based on power underpinned by hegemony and Prospero’s rhetorical question defines both Prospero and Caliban within a relationship that is “naturalized” through colonial culture.

What then is it that Caliban does in order to liberate himself from oppression? How does Caliban revolt? Pursuing the path of violence, Caliban mimes the role of the exotic savage and manipulates the ship-wrecked servant, Stephano, so that he imagines himself as king. “Vive le Roi” (Césaire 1969, 63) proclaims Caliban. He cleverly works with the assumptions that underpin the relationship of power between European and slave in order to advance his own cause. In doing so, Caliban convinces Stephano and Trinculo to help him recover his freedom, and the island, from Prospero. But when the moment comes to confront Prospero and to strike him with his sword (recall the encounter between Rebel and Master in Et les chiens se taisaient), Caliban hesitates and Prospero, seizing the moment, holds out his chest and challenges Caliban to strike him: “Frappe, mais frappe donc ! Ton maître ! Ton bienfaiteur” (79). Caliban, again, does not and is mocked by Prospero “tu n’es qu’un animal ; tu ne sais pas tuer.” At which point, Caliban calls on Prospero to defend himself and says “Je ne suis pas un assassin” (Césaire 1969). It is a key moment, for whereas in Et les chiens se taisaient the Rebel recounts “je frappai, le sang gicla,” here Césaire rewrites his own scene to reclaim it, I think, from Fanon’s use of it in Les Damnés de la terre, and to think through a non-violent humanist revolt.

As the scene continues. we get an insight into how Césaire might imagine the power and consequences of the non-violent approach. Prospero taunts Caliban: “Eh bien tant pis pour toi. Tu as laissé passer ta chance. Bête comme un esclave” (1969, 79). Here Prospero defines himself (implicitly and through contradistinction) as human in positioning Caliban as beast and slave. Prospero constructs himself through the degradation of the other. But Caliban’s character, in contrast, is expressed through his existential decision not to kill Prospero. When Prospero taunts Caliban that he cannot kill because he is an animal, Césaire puts before his audience a moment of dramatic irony, a distance opens up between Prospero’s idea of the human and the audience’s idea of humanity which comes to be embodied, in their eyes, in Caliban’s decision not to resort to violence rather than in the colonial ideology of race that underlies Prospero’s taunt.

Here the relationship between both men is irrevocably changed. This is the transformational moment where freedom is achieved through self-conscious insight rather than through the praxis of violence. The change only becomes apparent in the final scene when Caliban, in the longest monologue of the play, frees himself from the image within which Prospero had placed him:

Mais ta force, je m’en moque,

Comme de tes chiens, d’ailleurs,

de ta police, de tes inventions !

Et tu sais pourquoi je m’en moque ?

[…] C’est parce que je sais que je t’aurai.

Empalé! Et au pieu que

Tu auras toi-même aiguisé !

Empalé à toi-même !

Prospero, tu es un grand illusionniste :

le mensonge, ça te connaît.

Et tu m’as tellement menti,

menti sur le monde, menti sur moi-même,

que tu as fini par m’imposer

une image de moi-même :

Un sous-développé, comme tu dis,

un sous-capable,

voilà comment tu m’as obligé à me voir,

et cette image, je la hais! Et elle est fausse !

Mais maintenant, je te connais, vieux cancer,

et je me connais aussi! (Césaire 1969, 88)

In contrast to what happens in Shakespeare’s The Tempest (where Prospero pardons Caliban and returns to Italy) Prospero, in Césaire’s Une tempête, decides not to return to Europe. He stays on the island in order, he says, to confront Caliban’s violence with his own—“et désormais à ta violence je répondrai par la violence” (91). And yet Caliban’s only violence has been a conscious countering of the structure of colonial stereotypes through an act of non-violence and his own insight. This is not to say that Caliban renounces all violence, like Ariel. He still seeks to reclaim the island, still seeks to banish Prospero and his “blanche toxine” (87). This reference clearly echoes Fanon’s “la violence désintoxique,” yet, if we accept this reading, do we interpret it as signaling a form of a violence to come or as a reflection on a “disintoxification” achieved through insight? In any case, Prospero casts this as a negative project and Caliban replies that the negation of Prospero is a positive act. “Caliban dialectician !” responds Prospero. The Hegelian dialectic that gives the play its dynamism is here made explicit even if the outcome is not clear.

Prospero continues to need Caliban to structure his identity as master. Without the slave who is the master? In the end, Prospero’s simple division between master and slave, human and animal, is undone as the image he casts for Caliban is confused with his own image. This moment of dialectical confrontation draws the final act to an uncertain close. The curtain falls and when it raises again, time has passed. The stage directions do not mark this as an epilogue but it is one (time has passed and we have the final words). Prospero is before us and from his cave sees peccaries, opossums, wild boar; he fires at them, cries that nature is dirty and that the island’s temperature is dropping. He looks for Caliban. The rhetorical question “toi ou moi ?” (Césaire 1969, 55) that we saw above comes to be inflected with emotion and confusion: “Toi et moi ! Toi-moi ! Moi-toi !” (92). The terms are easily inverted and linked with a hyphen that also serves as uneasy separation. Prospero’s language, the language of empire, is no longer the perfect instrument of authority but one blunted by the resistance and conscious insight of the Empire’s colonial subject. Prospero’s language is “appauvri et stéréotypé” (91). Prospero, who had once embedded Caliban within the stereotypes of racialized oppression, is now characterized by a language that is worn out, impoverished.

This final scene is deeply ambiguous. It does not announce the tabula rasa of a new beginning, nor even the death of the master. This is in stark contrast to the opening page of Fanon’s Les Damnés de la terre where decolonization is presented as an opportunity for radical change and the creation of a new world upon a post-revolutionary tabula rasa. Fanon states at the outset of the chapter “De la violence”:

la décolonisation est très simplement le remplacement d‘une ‘espèce’ d’hommes par une autre ‘espèce’ d’hommes. Sans transition, il y substitution totale, complète, absolue. Certes, on pourrait également montrer le surgissement d’une nouvelle nation, l’installation d’un État nouveau […] Mais nous avons précisément choisi de parler de cette sorte de table rase qui définit au départ toute décolonisation. Son importance inhabituelle est qu’elle constitue, dès le premier jour, la revendication minimum du colonisé. (Césaire 2002 [1961], 39)

Gamal Abdel-Shehid and Zahir Kolia read Fanon’s reference to the tabula rasa as the sign of an “unspoken conversation” with Césaire and that “it is hard not to see the influence, somewhat negative, of Césaire in this passage” which they link to Césaire’s speech to the First Congress of Black Artists and Writers held in Paris in September 1956 (Abdel-Shehid, Kolia, and Caribbean Philosophical Association 2017, 178). I will return to the Congress below, but want push the argument further contending that the “conversation” did not finish there but after Fanon’s death and through Une tempête. In the end, what does Caliban have—insight, a shift in conscience, a realization of his humanity following the dramatic irony of the moment he refuses to kill Prospero? We do not see Caliban, we hear him cry out liberty in the distance across the sound of surf and chirping birds. Liberty, yes, and surrounded by nature, but he is not free of Prospero’s presence. There is no tabula rasa.

The encounter between Prospero and Caliban is a confrontation that is not so much materialist as one based on consciousness, it is transformational for Caliban but Prospero remains on his imagined island seeking to assert his identity as Master, in vain. This is and is not a utopian post-revolutionary future. The vestiges of the past remain within it yet the historical destiny of the revolutionary is yet to be realized. The dialectic of Master and Slave, represented throughout the Une tempête, is suspended, incomplete. There is no radical rupture with the past; it is the logic of hyphen and not the blank space of the tabula rasa that persists, that draws together and separates. Prospero remains on the island unable to leave because his identity is that of master and he is unable to rule because Caliban no longer recognizes him. Prospero is caught in a double bind that sees the final assertion of identity bound to another through a hyphen that brings together both characters within him Caliban-Prospero, Prospero-Caliban. Gone is the self-confident belief of the autonomous master; we are left with Prospero’s confusion that sutures the thesis and antithesis of dialectical progression. Prospero is not subsumed within the new synthesis of revolution.

Fanon argues that transition through peaceful means—from a colonized nation to an independent one—is not possible without some corrupting influences of the colonizer lingering and ultimately facilitating neo-colonial structures rather than the complete substitution of an old system for a new through violent revolution. This is why Fanon places great emphasis upon the tabula rasa. For Césaire, the question of violence is not as simple yet neither is the outcome of non-violent revolt.

Pursuing the dialectic of revolt further, I want to consider Martin Mégevand’s analysis of the tragedies of Kateb Yacine and Aimé Césaire. He draws his title—“The Tragedy of Decolonization: Dialectics at a Standstill”—from Walter Benjamin’s much cited proposition that “ambiguity is the manifest imaging of dialectic, the law of dialectics at a standstill” ([Benjamin (1935) 1999, 10] qtd. in Mégevand 2011, 186). Mégevand’s analysis of Césaire’s work focuses on Et les chiens se taisaient and La Tragédie du roi Christophe but his consideration of the endings of these tragedies of decolonization can prompt us to think further about the ending of Une tempête. Upon Benjamin’s “dialectics at a standstill,” Mégevand adds a layer from Homi Bhabha’s view on the temporality of the post-colonial as the “articulation of antagonistic or contradictory elements: a dialectic without the emergence of a teleological or transcendent History” (qtd. in Mégevand 2011, 200). Mégevand is of the view that Césaire’s tragedies contain a “message of distrust to any violent action” (199) and concludes that these plays, where dialectics are suspended, enact an inability to escape the traces of the war “to which they are tied” (200). This is echoed in the epilogue of Une tempête, yet there is a key distinction; it is not war or a violent act that brings the play to its end. Césaire does not offer an alternative resolution or an optimistic, unambiguous pathway to the construction of a new nationalist or humanist dispensation. The trace of the past in the present, the persistence of Prospero’s decaying colonialism, remains to be negotiated. There can be no clean slate, regardless of whether the present is arrived at through violence or non-violence.

Césaire had a view on the tabula rasa and never ceased to attend to a Hegelian notion of the dialectic and the double bind of the colonized. During the First Congress of Black Artists and Writers, in his address “Culture and Colonialism” (“Culture et colonization”), he declared that “Nous refusons de céder à la tentation de la table rase. Je refuse de croire que la future culture africaine puisse opposer une fin de non recevoir totale et brutale à l’ancienne culture africaine” (Césaire 1956a, 204). He makes this point against what he sees as the false binary requiring colonized societies on the one hand to choose between a wholly traditional culture, and on the other hand to effect a rupture with tradition and an acceptance of European culture as the only path towards progress. Césaire writes “dans toute société il y a toujours un équilibre, toujours précaire, toujours à refaire, et dans la pratique toujours refait par chaque génération, entre le nouveau et l’ancien” (Césaire 1956a). He asserts that each generation reworks an equilibrium between the new and the old. Fanon also had a view on inter-generational agency but one in which actions might be shrouded in opacity and outcomes result in either progress or betrayal: “Chaque génération doit dans une relative opacité découvrir sa mission, la remplir ou la trahir” (Fanon [1961] 2002, 197). Césaire’s conclusion on the task of each generation suggests that its echo may be heard in the epilogue to Une tempête. On the role of the Black intellectual, he writes:

Notre rôle n’est pas de bâtir à priori le plan de la future culture noire; de prédire quels éléments y seront intégrés, quels éléments en seront écartés. Notre rôle, infiniment plus humble est d’annoncer la venue de celui qui détient la réponse: le peuple, nos peuples libérés de leurs entraves, nos peuples et leur génie créateur. […]

Nous sommes aujourd’hui dans le chaos culturel. Notre rôle est de dire: libérez le démiurge qui seul peut organiser ce chaos en une synthèse nouvelle, une synthèse qui méritera elle le nom de culture, une synthèse qui sera réconciliatrice et dépassement de l’ancien et du nouveau […] Laissez entrer les peuples noirs sur la grande scène de l’histoire. (1956a, 205)

At the end of Une tempête the suspended dialectic is perhaps a pause, an invitation, a call to respond. Past and present are linked by the hyphen of non-rupture, one of inversion and confusion that speaks to the uncertainties of the process of decolonization, a troubling of the notion of an after emancipation that sees Césaire lean against his younger predecessor, Fanon, yet does not offer the final, definitive word. The suspended dialectic, the rejection of the tabula rasa, and the act of non-violence combine to present the audience with the complexity of the transitionary moment and the need, and injunction, to put “freedom,” “liberté,” “uhuru” to work and draw it from the creative chaos of Eshu and towards “une nouvelle synthèse” (Césaire 1956a). The future remains to be made, the suspension of the dialectic is momentary, the prospect of change is certain but whether the outcome is better or worse remains in play.

In three languages freedom is evoked in Une tempête (“uhuru,” “liberté” and “freedom”) but the very final line doubles down on the ambiguity of the conclusion. The stage directions read “On entend au loin parmi le bruit du ressac et des piaillements d’oiseaux les débris du chant de Caliban LA LIBERTÉ OHÉ, LA LIBERTÉ.” (Césaire 1969, 92). Amidst and through the squawking of birds and the crashing of waves, we hear “les débris” of Caliban’s chant. The use of the upper case affirms the cry of freedom but the lexical choice of “débris”—remains, ruins, debris—hardly reinforces Caliban’s message as it competes with nature or issues from it. It raises further questions.⁶

However uncertain its end,⁷ Une tempête remains as the articulation and affirmation of an alternative to the violence of physical revolt: Césaire engages with Fanon’s work, in particular with Fanon’s repeated citation of the Rebel’s confrontation with the Master in Et les chiens se taisaient. In doing so he continues and complicates their intergenerational dialogue and captures the overlapping, tressed strands of their thought. Fanon now seems prior to Césaire in that line of filiation with which we are familiar. Césaire-Fanon-Césaire; there is—following Glissant’s notion of filiation cited in the opening remarks above—no monofiliation along this genealogical line, no single line of affiliative thought, but a set of intersubjective and intertextual exchanges concerned with a deeply embedded set of colonial problems that endured and re-emerged across the generations. Wilder argues that their concerns and exchanges are clear in the earlier publications, Cahier d’un retour au pays natal and Peau noire masques blancs which, he says, “ultimately retreat from their own radical critiques of humanism and nativism as equally inadequate responses to a multifaceted and inexorable colonial racism.” “Fanon follows Césaire” Wilder continues, and “cannot overcome his predecessor’s limitations”; but both “engaged the persistent structures of colonial racism that constituted concrete historical legacies of emancipation” (2004, 51). But it did not end there. Césaire’s return to the impasse in Une tempête affirms the primacy of non-violence and complex, hyphenated identities that were to provide the conditions for a socio-political synthesis to come. Indeed, such hyphenated identities were central to Césaire’s own complex intellectual filiation that acknowledged the legacy of Fanon, post-Fanon.

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Patrick Crowley

Patrick Crowley teaches francophone literatures and cultures. His primary focus is on aesthetic form particularly within colonial and postcolonial contexts and with a special focus on contemporary Algerian cultural production. With Carlos Garrido Castellano, he co-edited a thematic issue of Interventions titled “The Afterlives of Anticolonial Aesthetics” (2022). Other work consists of a range of edited and co-edited volumes including Algeria: Nation, Culture and Transnationalism 1988–2015 (Liverpool University Press, 2017), a thematic issue of Studies in Travel Writing titled “Travel, Colonialism and Encounters with the Maghreb: Algeria” (2017) and, with Megan MacDonald, co-edited an issue of Contemporary French and Francophone Studies titled “The Contemporary Roman Maghrébin: Aesthetics, Politics, Production 2000–2015” (2016). His scholarly edition of L’Exotisme : la littérature coloniale (by Louis Cario and Charles Régismanset, [1911]) was published in 2016.

Notes

1 For Wilder “Antillean humanism in the poetry of Césaire signals not only the end of colonial domination but the inauguration of a new humanity that has recovered its poetic relationship to knowledge and life, one that has reconjugated the relation between painful histories and possible worlds, one that has reconciled human, natural, and supernatural dimensions of life” (2015, 29).

2 On Fanon’s humanism see Hiddleston 2021 [2014], 120–124.

3 The evolution of Et les chiens se taisaient moved across at least 10 years and different genres. It began as a dramatic poem, not as a play, and was published at the end of his poetry collection Les Armes miraculeuses in 1946 and bore the subtitle “Tragédie.” A stage version was published in 1956 by Présence africaine (see Mégevand 2011, 187). Allen (2017) draws our attention to the work of genetic criticism undertaken by Alex Gil where he identifies the original work as written during the Vichy occupation of Martinique (1940–1943) and where the bloody nature of revolution is vividly depicted and the exhortation to “Tuez les blancs” is repeated on a number of occasions whereas in the 1956 play it appears once. See Gil 2013.

4 As I worked on the final version of this article, I spoke with Jane Hiddleston about Fanon’s use of Et les chiens se taisaient and she kindly sent me a copy of her monograph Frantz Fanon: Literature and Invention (2022) which includes a compelling, close reading of Fanon’s citation of the Rebel’s encounter with the Master. She writes “It is an affirmation of rebellion accomplished through extraordinary poetic language capable of voicing change, and works alongside, but crucially on a different level from, the actual act of violence. Fanon does not go so far as to articulate explicitly how Césaire’s drama wields its power, but the choices he makes in quoting from it, and the language of prophecy with which he frames the quotation, finish by demonstrating this symbolic effect (Hiddleston 2022, 134–135). I am grateful to Jane for the conversation and the gift.

5 The literature on postcolonial re-writings of Shakespeare’s The Tempest is extensive. For African and Caribbean re-workings see Rob Nixon (1987) but much has appeared since. On Césaire’s specific appropriation of The Tempest see Russell West (2007) and Joseph Khoury (2006) amongst many others.

6 For example, Jacques Derrida presents Freedom as a pure concept like gift, hospitality and justice; each concept is unconditional and not part of a more general economy of exchange. Liberty is an injunction, an affirmation, a task, not a decision but an axiom (2008, 401–402). As such, liberty co-exists with the trace of the other as there is no state of pure autonomy.

7 Cesaire’s final word may not have been at the end of Une tempête. We have forgotten Ariel who was “emancipated” by Prospero after he had served his time as the faithful slave. Ariel’s monologue presents his vision of the future, one in which he will sing four notes “si douces que la dernière fera lever une brûlure dans le cœur des esclaves les plus oublieux nostalgie de liberté” (1969, 83). Ariel hopes that the song of liberty will cause those enslaved to rise up. Ariel too appears to remain on the island, he is the slave who has not exorcised himself of his Master’s colonial violence through an act of violence. He continues to affirm the power of the arts to awaken the oppressed, to herald the possibility of a new humanist dispensation in the face of enslavements to come.