Inflecting the French

Abstract

Aimé Césaire’s long poem Cahier d’un retour au pays natal is the most expressive example of his ambitious effort “infléchir le français” (“to inflect the French”), as he famously put it in an interview, “pour exprimer, dison: ce moi, ce moi-nègre, ce moi-créole, ce moi-martiniquais, ce moi-antillais” (translated by Brent Edwards, this reads: “in order to express, let’s say: “this I, this nègre-I, this creole-I, this Martinican-I, this Antillean-I”). Many scholars have read the Cahier’s inflection of French language and discourse in terms of its elaborate use of Latinate neologisms, archaic terminology, and typographic wordplay; however, less attention has been given to the implications this poem’s tortuous shifts in address have as a radical critique of the formal desires and ontological exclusions of Enlightenment universalism. Through the way Césaire rearticulates the basic components of grammatical address in a vexed, lyric encounter with the colonial reality of Martinique, he gradually recalibrates the relationship between the poem’s speaker and the African-diasporic community of and beyond Martinique as that between a kind of intersubjective voice of négritude and a globally discursive locus of anticolonialism—what he later calls the “rendez-vous de la conquête” (“convocation of conquest”).