A few days later, I was on my way to Fort-de-France, Martinique. Over the course of several mornings, we met in his office where he had served as mayor for 56 years. This man, with whom I was talking for the first time on a one-to-one basis, was extremely gracious, at once attentive and aloof, shy and friendly, interested but also absent at times. I handed him a few books. He took an immediate interest in two recently reprinted Greek and Latin classics. He had always loved literature from this period, especially Greek tragedies, and nothing had changed. However, he didn’t show too much enthusiasm for the books on history and art. He was quick to ask me exactly what I hoped to achieve and had a hard time believing these interviews would be of interest to anyone. That his writing continued to resonate with people was unthinkable to him, and he was very surprised to hear that the students I had then at Goldsmiths College in London studied his work closely and quoted from it, especially Discourse on Colonialism and Journal of a Homecoming.1 I told him about the fervor surrounding his work in the United States and that I had heard experts from around the world – Japan, Germany, and the Anglophone Caribbean – discuss it at length at a conference at New York University. This made him smile. I made it clear that he was known, admired, and respected throughout the world. People valued his opinions, his take on matters. Sure, in France he wasn’t the established figure he was elsewhere, but did that surprise him? “No,” he told me, nor did he seem concerned to remedy this. Césaire was skeptical, even disdainful, of awards, recognition, glory. He had chosen to live in Martinique, turning down several opportunities that would have granted him more money or a lavish lifestyle. He was happy on his island. He repeated this several times. However, his feelings toward the French Antilles hadn’t always been so charitable: “to talk about the history of the Antilles, my desire to leave the Antilles for good, I mean, this place on the margins of history, this unspeakable pit of hunger, misery and oppression.”2 He had both rejected a romanticized fantasy of the tropical islands, which the famous opening of his Journal of a Homecoming describes as “the starving Antilles, the Antilles pockmarked with smallpox, the Antilles dynamited with alcohol, run aground in the mud of this bay, in the dust of this town ominously grounded,”3 and expressed a deep attachment to Martinique, the “geometric center of love and morality,” as Michel Leiris put it.4 Just like Leiris, he sympathized with the people of Martinique, and were it not for this “affective motivation,” he wouldn’t have had any reason to take an interest in “the fate of the cane field worker over that of the dockers in Rouen.”5 He also experienced, he said, the anxiety of isolation: “I wasn’t a calm person … I had that Antillean anxiety.”6 An anxiety symptomatic of the “unease of a people whose fate is no longer in their own hands, who feel like a mere accessory in a drama of which they should be the protagonist.”7 He expressed this again to me in these terms: “My dear friend, it isn’t easy being Antillean. I’m sure it isn’t easy being Réunionese, but that’s the way it is, and we have to assume this with courage, dignity, and, if need be, pride.”
The city shut down at noon, its streets empty and quiet. In La Savane, a large park along the wharf, we saw the headless, paint-smeared statue of Empress Josephine. The French officials had given up on replacing the head, since each time they tried to fix it, the next night it would go missing again. Lining the park’s western edge, on Rue de la Liberté, we strolled past the faded glory of the Bibliothèque Schoelcher, the Musée d’Archéologie Précolombienne et Préhistoire de la Martinique and the Pavillon Bougenot, built in the colonial style. Césaire was very proud of his city, especially the neighborhoods he had modernized by bringing in water and electricity and creating a sewage system. Every Thursday afternoon his driver would take him for a ride through the mountains and along the coast. He invited me to join him. He came with his driver to pick me up and brought with him two books: one on the island’s flora so that he could name the flowers and plants we’d see; the other a work of philosophy since I had asked him about his influences when he was younger. He had the driver stop on several occasions for me to admire a particular view, plant, or tree. He’d tell me the names of the various communes and explain the ties their elected officials had with his party, the Parti Progressiste Martiniquais (PPM). We drove up Mount Pelée, which was draped in fog. He expressed his admiration for this place. People would recognize him and greet him with respect from afar. Césaire didn’t come across as someone who would provoke a casual attitude in you. With a distinguished elegance of times past, he wore a suit and tie every day, and no one would dare think you’d ever catch him in a T-shirt and shorts. We drove back down toward the city of Saint-Pierre where he showed me around. The destruction of this city in a matter of minutes on May 8, 1902 from a volcanic eruption at Mount Pelée remains a significant date for Martinique. Historians speak of a death toll of 28,000 – people suffocated, charred, burned alive – a city covered in ash, a boiling sea where those fleeing the lava sought refuge only to drown, an unbearable heat and stench the following days, corpses in the streets and along the port, buildings in ruins. The city known as the “Paris of the Caribbean” for its theaters, its cultural and social life, became a ghost city in no more than a few minutes. This catastrophe robbed the city of its splendor and prestige, which it would never regain. Today it’s a small village that forfeited its status as the capital to Fort-de-France after its destruction. Césaire showed me what remained of the theater, then asked his driver to turn down Fonds-Saint-Denis where a kapok tree stood spreading its majestic branches at the juncture of two roads. Its charred trunk was a reminder of its having been a victim of the 1902 volcanic eruption. But, 50 years later, buds appeared and it started to blossom and grow. Césaire often came to admire this tree, which, more than a century old, didn’t just survive a catastrophe but, with its new growth, proved nature’s indifference to catastrophes. These are the places he liked to visit, letting his mind wander, jotting down lines of poetry, lost in contemplation.
Every morning, between nine and noon, we’d sit down for our interview. He’d tire quickly, due in part to his age but also to the long life he had lived. He had said and written so much, what was there left to explain, justify, defend, argue? “My poetry speaks for me,” he said on more than one occasion. But I wanted to talk about his political work, his less “visible” activity, which hadn’t received as much attention: his analysis of French colonialism. Although rather surprised by this interest initially, he indulged me and also asked me many questions about Africa. After learning that I went there often, that I knew South Africa quite well, he wanted me to talk more about it. Our conversations were unstructured, at times bewilderingly so. They carried on for a few days but then it became clear it was time to leave. I understood that Césaire had told me everything he had wanted to tell me.
There are many reasons I had wanted to interview him. First of all, I wanted to remind people of the role Césaire played for the generation of women and men responsible for dismantling colonialism, a role I judged too soon forgotten. He was also, as I said, someone I had heard about throughout my childhood. He knew my grandfather, Raymond Vergès, very well, the two of them having worked together to transform the colonies of Martinique, Guadeloupe, Réunion and Guiana into French departments. Then his work as a deputy of Martinique and leader of the Parti Progressiste Martiniquais made him a familiar name around the house and at political gatherings. He was close with other politicians from Réunion and his party collaborated with leftist parties from the overseas departments on initiatives to democratize the political, social, and cultural life of these territories. I was very familiar with two of his texts: Journal of a Homecoming and Discourse on Colonialism, which I deemed essential reading for understanding decolonization. In short, Césaire was a well-known figure whom I held in great esteem and for whom I had the utmost respect. Once I began talking about my idea to interview Césaire, many people in France, however, claimed to be unfamiliar with his writing and his work. Or they simply thought he had died. I wasn’t too surprised. This was symptomatic of France’s opinion of the overseas departments, whose culture and history remained