“Colombes et Menfenil” in Text and Image: Taking Flight From Conquest in Aimé Césaire and Wifredo Lam’s Collaborative Aesthetics

1 In Aimé Césaire’s essay on Wifredo Lam’s art from the mid-1940s, he signals both the universal reach and particular location of Lam’s work 1 . He first describes the universal gift of Lam’s work as follows: « Dans une société où la machine et l’argent ont démesurément agrandi la distance de l’homme aux choses, Wifredo Lam fixe sur la toile la cérémonie pour laquelle toutes existent : la cérémonie de l’union physique de l’homme et du monde 2 . » In this formulation, Césaire ascribes to Lam’s painting a reparative quality to the alienation imposed by modernity. Lam’s art as ceremony restores the unity fractured by modernity. Lam’s particular location (or locus of enunciation) for this kind of work is as important, and Césaire positions it in a poetic formulation: « Et que c’est au nom de ces hommes, au nom de ces rescapés du plus grand naufrage de l’histoire, que parle Wifredo Lam 3 . » The move is subtle, and Césaire is not specific here about which peoples exactly Lam paints in the name of , but the context of Césaire’s reading of Lam includes the history of empire in the Caribbean that shapes both artists, including the history of chattel slavery, the lack of restitution for the formerly enslaved upon abolition, the regime of indentured labor that succeeded from it, and the continued racialized character of dispossession throughout the Caribbean and beyond. While Césaire writes about Lam, we might also understand Césaire’s work as a universal restoration of the world enacted in the name of the survivors of history’s greatest shipwreck. The ceremony of Lam’s work, like that of Césaire’s, starts from the alienation of the survivors of history and takes flight from the distortions of history’s violence to the edge ( au bout ) of its beyond, where the This essay examines a little-studied aesthetic collaboration between Aimé Césaire and Wifredo Lam to depict doves and a bird of prey (called “menfenil”) in text and image. “Colombes et menfenil” was the title of a selection of poems by Césaire that was published in Hémisphères magazine in 1944 with an illustration by Wifredo Lam. Both birds also appear in Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal and Lam’s illustrations of the of the Spanish translation of this poem published in Cuba the previous year. They go on to recur in later paintings by Lam: “Menfenil” (1947), “Lunguanda yembe” (1950), and “La colombe noire” (1959). The birds in question have archetypical significance as symbols of peace and war that connect to the history of colonialism. I propose with this essay a critical dialogue with Césaire and Lam’s work on these birds to diffuse the conquest-thinking that informs the symbolic economy and contributes to normalizing the persistence of racialized hierarchies embedded in the history of colonial dispossession and exploitation. In their collaborative aesthetic recasting of these archetypal bird figures, I argue that both poet and painter symbolically take them over to take flight from conquest. Lunguanda yembe et La colombe noire Ces oiseaux représentent une figure archétypale de la paix et de la guerre liée à l’histoire du colonialisme. Je propose dans cet essai un dialogue critique avec l’œuvre de Césaire et de Lam concernant ces oiseaux pour examiner une pensée de la conquête qui a produit une économie symbolique contribuant à accréditer des hiérarchies raciales persistantes ancrées dans l’histoire de la dépossession et l’exploitation coloniales. Dans leur commune refonte esthétique, le poète et le peintre utilisent tous deux ces oiseaux archétypaux comme moyen pour s’envoler loin de la conquête.