What would Aimé Césaire have thought of the Affaire Aragon and how might the issues raised by the Affaire have affected the writing of the Cahier d'un retour au pays natal?

Césaire was in Paris at the time of Louis Aragon's trial for treason against the French government during the years 1931-32.1 Although officially neither a surrealist nor a communist (the two groups involved in the Affaire), he inhabited the same social space as René Ménil, Jules Monnerot, and Etienne Léro, the Martinquan students who launched the surrealist journal, Légitime défense, and Tiemoko Garan Kouyaté, editor of the communist journal, Le Cri des Nègres, whom he knew through Léopold Sédar Senghor.2 These two groups of Black francophone intellectuals provided two contrasting notions of how literary and cultural production might intervene in the anti-colonial struggle with which they both identified their labors. As a young poet and colonial subject, Césaire was himself trying to forge a connection between literary production and political agency. Doubtless, then, he would have been fascinated by the debates concerning the relationship between poetic language and political engagement that Aragon's controversial and "treasonous" poem, "Front rouge," had ignited. Césaire's approach to the potential political valence of poetic writing was shaped not only by his extensive background in French literature and by his acquaintance with African understandings of the performative nature of poetry as incantation, but also by the immediate context for interpreting literature as action that Paris of the 1930s provided.

The significance of the Affaire Aragon to French intellectual life in general-and to the intellectual life of francophone writers in particular-cannot be emphasized enough. The Affaire Aragon quite simply forced the intellectual elite to take sides: to state either that poetry can be political in the same way that propaganda is political (Aragon's contention), or, alternatively, that poetry cannot be political in the same way that propaganda is political (Breton's contention). For hard-line communist writers, a poem could be considered a political act vulnerable to accusations of treason because poetic language ultimately functions in the same way as do all forms of language: it means what it says. For hard-line surrealists, however, poetry could not be accused of treason, not because poetic language possesses no political value or efficacy, but because its political value and efficacy inhere specifically in the way figurative language (and poetry is always figurative) transcends the referential function characterizing ideological discourse. In short, at stake in the battle between Aragon and Breton was the nature of poetic language itself. The terms of this debate left their mark on the Cahier, determining the way in which discourses derived directly from Black communist periodicals of the interwar years (i.e., "Debout les nègres!") come into contact with discourses characterized by the kind of paronomasic play and figurative instability found in works by Rimbaud, Lautréamont, and Breton. Césaire's Cahier can be read as an attempt on the part of the author to work out his relationship to the issues raised by the Affaire; the richness of the Cahier's texture is in part due to Césaire's struggle with the conflicting sets of aesthetic and political commitments to which he was, during his stay in Paris, exposed.

Given the centrality of the Affaire-both with respect to interwar literary production and to the development of anticolonial and postcolonial discourses throughout the century-it is surprising that theorists of postcolonial literature have not treated its significance at greater length. It would not be an exaggeration to say that postcolonial theory has almost entirely neglected the Affaire Aragon, and that it has thereby suppressed the historical and discursive links that bind together Breton's theory of poetic language, Sartre's theory of engagement, Fanon's dismissal of poetry as irrelevant to anticolonial struggles, and, most recently, Said's identification of poetic language with a universalist (as opposed to nationalist or ethnic) agenda. In an attempt to redress this omission, I return to a moment in French literary history that set the tone for postcolonial theory's treatment of poetry. Through a series of close readings, I demonstrate that postcolonial theory (as well as Aimé Césaire's poetry) owes a great deal to the repartee conducted in print between Aragon and Breton, and that in fact many of the debates pursued in postcolonial studies today merely rehearse the positions introduced into circulation during the period of the Affaire.

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1 Aimé Césaire left Martinique and began attending the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris in September of 1931. For two years he studied to pass the competitive exams for entrance to the Ecole Normale Supérience. While at the Lycée, Césaire made the acquaintance of Leópold Sédar Senghor, with whom he would publish the journal, L'Etudiant noir, in 1935. For an account of this period, see A. James Arnold, Modernism and Negritude: The Poetry and Poetics of Aimé Césaire (Cambridge, Ma.: Harvard UP, 1981); Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge, Ma.: Harvard UP, 2003); and Michael Richardson, ed., Refusal of the Shadow: Surrealism and the Caribbean (London: Verso, 1996). Richardson writes in the Introduction that among the readers of Légitime défense "may or may not have been … Aimé Césaire" (5).

2 See René Depestre, "An Interview with Aimé Césaire"(1967) in Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (1972; reprint, New York: Monthly Review, 2000) and Georges Ngal, Aimé Césaire: un homme à la recherche d'une patrie (1975; reprint, Présence Africaine, 1994).