Malinda Words: Pity the all-knowing and naïve as they stutter grandiose alibis!

Aimé Césaire

I first came across the Francophone Martinician poet, author and politician Aimé Césaire (1913 to 2008) while reading Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth. Since then I’ve always looked for his books whenever visiting bookstores, especially in the USA. ‘Return to my native land’ is new to me, although it was written 84 years ago, in 1939.

What is the ‘native land’ that Césaire returned to or advocated returning? Gamal Abdel-Shehid and Zahir Kolia in an article published in the CLR James Journal in 2017 titled ‘Re-reading Césaire and Fanon,’ gives a clue. They argue, ’[Césaire’s anti-colonial philosophy can be understood as an “ethics of acceptance” that seeks to journey to the inward of human consciousness in order to
transcend the black’s negative self-concept under colonialism.’

Colonialism didn’t end. Its victims still suffer from a negative sense of self. Césaire it seems insists on the importance of erasing whiteness, the worship of whiteness, the belief that whiteness can be acquired and the blackness that is reviled by the victims of whiteness who look to whiteness to shed black skin. The native land is a place of the mind, I feel, that recognises but is not fixated by colour.

There are interesting extrapolations. White-Black can be a metaphor for powerful-powerless, tyrants-subjugated, capitalist-worker, monarch-subject, mainstream-marginal etc. Seeking the native land, then, is a radical proposition that encourages a re-examination of ‘self’ or one’s location in a power structure.

The native land of consciousness is without boundary. It is not contained in time. The conditions of subjugation and resistance that he dissects to reveal their mechanics and signatures are not trapped in the year 1939; they did not perish in 2008 with the poet. They are today’s stories.

‘Return to my native land’ has been hailed as ‘an anthem for the African diaspora’ and is described as being ‘at once a cry of rebellion and a celebration of black identity.’ I am yet to read it cover to cover, but as with all books of poetry, even those that take the form of a long poetic narrative such as this, I turned to a random page.

Listen to the white world
appallingly weary from its immense effort
the crack of its joints rebelling under the hardness of the stars
listen to the proclaimed victories which trumpet their defeats
listen to their grandiose alibis (stumbling so lamely)

That’s today, people. That’s the today of the West bending over backwards to draping their moral collapse in what they believe are flags of righteousness, stumbling over words they’ve made sure have lost all meaning, and fervently believing that it is possible to legislate lie as truth, plunder as gift, war cry as lullaby and genocide as liberation.

Yes, the death-hungry grandmasters turning children into orphans and orphans into corpses, have been egged on by the white world so consumed by its daily bread of ignorance, racism and brutality that it cannot spit out the corrosive bile that is burning its insides.

As I watch this white world whose flags of genocide, racism, deceit and delusion twist in agony in what has to be its last hurrah, as its children knowing better walk away from the true homes of tyranny, as their Genocidal Joes and Julies struggle to string together grandiose alibis, I am compelled to concur with Aimé Césaire:

Pity for our conquerors, all-knowing and naïve!

I wish I had the power to set up confessionals draped with the flags each and every murderer and apologist waved and that I had the authority to ordain as many priests as necessary to listen to their confessions.

None of them need any of that, though for they can repent.

Penitence! Penitence! Penitence! Penitence from now until death, moment to moment, with or without rosary, with or without the lip-power to utter the prayers of the lords, gods or angels they worship, within or without preferred church. It just might provide succor.

And thus find a way to return to a native land they've left far behind, if they ever lived there at all.

['The Morning Inspection' is the title of a column I wrote for the Daily News from 2009 to 2011, one article a day, Monday through Saturday. This is the 288th article in the new series that began in December 2022. Links to previous articles are given below]

08 December 2023

Pity the all-knowing and naïve as they stutter grandiose alibis!

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