As he wandered through the forlorn streets of Fort-de-France, Breton did at last find something to read. He was looking for a ribbon to give to his daughter Aube but the draper’s shop in which he found it also had something else on display. It was a little magazine, which Breton bought for twelve francs. Having seen something of the intellectual poverty of Robert’s Martinique, he expected to be disappointed:
I couldn’t believe my eyes: but what was being said there was what had to be said, not only as well as it could be said but as loudly as it could be said! All the grimacing shadows were torn apart and dispelled; all the lies and all the derision turned to rags: the voice of a man which had not been broken or drowned out stood up like a sword of light. Aimé Césaire was the name of the man speaking.9
Breton had stumbled across the first issue of Tropiques, which was published in April 1941.10 Césaire’s short ‘introduction’ was in itself stunning:
A silent, sterile land. It’s our land I am talking about. By the Caribbean Sea, my ear takes stock of the terrifying silence of Man. Europe, Africa, Asia. I can hear the steel screaming, the tomtoms in the bush, the temple praying among the banyans. And I know that it is man who is speaking. And I still listen, keep listening. But here, the monstrous atrophy of the voice, the centuries-long despondency, the prodigious dumbness. No town. No art. No poetry . . . A death worse than death, where the living wander. Elsewhere, the sciences progress, philosophies renew themselves and aesthetics succeed one another. And on this land, our hand sows seeds in vain. No town. No art. No poetry. Not a seed. Not a shoot. Or only the hideous leprosy of imitations. In truth, a sterile, silent land . . . Wherever we look, the darkness is gaining ground. The lights go out one after another. The circle of darkness closes in, amidst the screams of men and the howling of wild animals. And yet we are some of those who say no to the darkness. We know that the salvation of the world depends on us too. That the world needs its sons, no matter who they are. The humblest . . .11
The shop in which Breton bought Tropiques belonged to the sister of René Ménil, who, along with Césaire and his wife Suzanne, was the main inspiration behind the journal. All three were teachers at the Lycée Schoelcher. Their paths were to diverge, with Césaire becoming Martinique’s best-known poet-politician, whilst Ménil became the Martinican Communist Party’s chief spokesman on cultural affairs,12 but for the moment they formed the nucleus of a highly innovative undertaking. Given the small scale of Foyalais society, it was not difficult for Breton to arrange to meet both men. The final product of the meeting was Breton’s essay ‘A Great Black Poet’, which was printed as the preface to the bilingual edition of Cahier d’un retour au pays natal/Memorandum on My Martinique, published in New York by Brentano’s in 1947. Here, Breton remarks of Césaire: ‘This is a black man who handles the French language better than any white man can handle it today.’13 Césaire did not take exception to this, and Breton’s essay was first published in the May 1944 issue of Tropiques. Although it now sounds patronizing, the remark was well-meaning; André Breton has been accused of many things but casual racism is not one of them. Fanon, however, took the view that there was no reason for this to be said.14 No one would describe Breton as ‘a great white poet’, and Césaire was not writing in a foreign language.
Eleven issues of Tropiques were published between 1941 and 1945. Exploiting elements of surrealism, psychoanalysis and anthropology, the journal began to take a new look at Martinican realities and to dig beneath the veneer of universal French culture. To that extent, it anticipates the negritude with which Césaire was so closely associated in the post-war years, and which both attracted and repelled Fanon. Writing in the April 1942 issue, Suzanne Césaire, who appears to have quite disappeared from public life after 1945, made an astonishing analysis of the ‘discontents’ of Martinican civilization. The desire to imitate French culture that was originally a defence against an oppressive society was now unconscious:
No ‘evolved’ Martinican is willing to admit that he is no more than an imitation, because his current situation appears to him to be natural, spontaneous and born of his most legitimate aspirations. To that extent, he is being sincere. He really does not KNOW that he is an imitation. He is ignorant of his own nature, but it exists all the same . . . The hysteric is unaware of the fact that he is merely imitating a disease . . . Similarly, analysis shows us that the attempt to adapt to a foreign style that is made of the Martinican, has the effect of creating a state of pseudo-civilization which we can describe as abnormal or teratoid.15
There is no indication in his published work that Frantz Fanon ever read Suzanne Césaire’s essay, and whether or not he ever read Tropiques must remain a matter for conjecture. It is, on the other hand, almost inconceivable that he did not know something about it. The little journal was produced by teachers at the lycée he attended and, whilst he was not taught by Ménil, he was in contact with Césaire. René Ménil is mentioned only once in Peau noire, masques blancs. A single quotation is borrowed by Fanon from Leiris’s ‘Martinique, Guadeloupe, Haiti’, and it comes from Ménil’s ‘Situation de la poésie aux Antilles’, published in Tropiques in May 1944. Ménil is describing his ‘analytic and historical examination of the Antillean mentality’. It reveals that:
The contemporary super-ego of the Antillean people, which was shaped, let us not forget, in the not-so-far-off good old days of slavery, is the result of an operation in three parts. First, the traumatic repression of the way of life of the negro slaves (African totemism): this explains the centuries-old charge of anxiety which . . . drowns the collective consciousness in the Antilles. Secondly, the replacement, within the consciousness of the slaves, of the repressed spirit by an agency representing the master, an agency established within the depths of the collectivity, and which keeps it under guard in the way that a garrison keeps guard over a conquered town: this explains the Antillean people’s inferiority complex. Thirdly, the negro turns his aggressivity against himself. As it can find so little expression in a society founded upon exceptional cruelty, that aggressivity is turned against him and strangles him within his own consciousness: this explains the existence of a certain masochism amongst the Antillean people.16
Like Leiris, Fanon mentions only the second of Ménil’s three stages.17 This strongly suggests that he had not read Ménil’s article itself; had he done so, he would surely have picked up the reference to aggressivity. He clearly recognized his own concerns in the passage he found in Leiris, and those concerns have to be recognized as being profoundly Martinican.
Tropiques was a rare beacon of hope in an otherwise bleak Fort-de-France and it was soon extinguished, if only temporarily. All those who arrived on the Capitaine Paul Lemerle found their enforced stay in Martinique frustrating. Rumours about boats that were about to leave inevitably proved to be unfounded, and obtaining visas from the Dominican consulate was a slow process. On 16 May, Breton at last boarded the Presidente Trujillo, which took him to Guadeloupe and then the Dominican Republic, from whence he finally reached New York. Lévi-Strauss spent more time in Martinique. He had time to witness Martinican justice at work when he attended the trial of a peasant who had bitten off part of the ear of an opponent during a fight. It took five minutes for the three judges to sentence him to eight years’ imprisonment. Writing about the incident in 1955, Lévi-Strauss commented: ‘Even today, no dream, however fantastic, can inspire me with such a feeling of incredulity.’18 Had he spent more time in Martinique, his credulity would have been very strained. Although the atmosphere was sinister, with the police spinning webs of deceit around everyone, the anthropologist enjoyed what he saw of the countryside