"Paris soit ce soir une ville martiniquaise"

"This evening, Paris is a Martinican city"--a rather lovely line (roughly translated) from the speech made earlier by Bertrand Delanoë, the mayor of Paris, at a memorial ceremony for Aimé Césaire. Le Figaro reports:

Une minute de silence. Puis une veillée avec chants et musique créole. «Aux Antilles, la mort n'est pas un moment de pleurs mais un moment de joie. Ce soir, nous allons fêter un grand homme, un grand Français en espérant que son message ne sera pas oublié» a déclaré Patrick Karam, délégué interministériel pour l'Egalité des chances des Français d'outre-mer. Plusieurs centaines de personnes se sont rassemblées samedi sur la place de la Sorbonne à Paris pour une veillée «à la mode antillaise» en hommage au poète.

Remembering Césaire

Aimé Césaire on the front page of today's Le Monde


Some more of the tributes to Aimé Césaire that have appeared online since his death on Thursday:

For poets such as Césaire, freedom is not an abstract idea. His legacy is for us to pursue freedom (self-actualization) in the body and the mind—the abilty to realize the full expression of an individual talent unbound by race, class, creed, religion, gender or sexual preference.

For if the goal of any life is freedom, then Aimé Césaire was a light.

-- Geoffrey Philp, from a thoughtful short essay posted at his blog on Friday.


It is not often that politics and poetry go together, but when they do, the West Indies is as fertile an environment as any for the two to coexist. Césaire seamlessly blended his love for language, ideas and writing into his political life, which spanned almost 60 years.

-- From the Global Voices roundup of bloggers' reactions to Césaire's death, with links to tributes from Martinique, Trinidad, Senegal, Congo, Togo, and the United States; authored by Jennifer Brea and Janine Mendes-Franco.


Il est extrêmement frappant de voir qu'en Martinique chacune et chacun a un Césaire à raconter. Son Césaire. Le grand homme, il est vrai, a de quoi nourrir diversement les uns et les autres : noir, poète, élu, humaniste. Il a, peu ou prou, accompagné tous ses compatriotes de son île natale.

-- From a memoir of Césaire by Patrice Louis, Le Monde's correspondent in Martinique, and author of Conversations avec Aimé Césaire, posted yesterday at the Le Monde website (in French).


We have all been marked by the universal import of Aimé Césaire’s call for human dignity, watchfulness and responsibility.

-- From UNESCO Director-General Koïchiro Matsuura's statement on Thursday.


Très émus, mais dans une ambiance sereine, souvent joyeuse, les habitants de Fort-de-France et des autres communes de l'île, tous âges confondus, ont applaudi le passage du fourgon transportant la dépouille de Césaire en chantant, en scandant son nom ou en brandissant des portraits du poète. Des inscriptions «Merci Papa Aimé» ou «Merci Césaire», avaient été tracées à la peinture sur les trottoirs et des portraits du poète collés aux murs.

-- From a report in Le Figaro on the first stage of Césaire's funeral procession in Fort-de-France yesterday (in French).




Césaire's autograph, dated November 2005, from the collection of St. Lucian poet John Robert Lee

R.I.P. Aimé Césaire, 25 June, 1913-17 April, 2008

Sad (but not entirely unexpected) news from Martinique this morning: Aimé Césaire, one of the Caribbean's (and France's) major writers, leader of the negritude movement, and author of the seminal Cahier d'un retour au pays natal, has died at the age of 94, after being admitted to hospital last week. In the coming days, tributes will flow from writers across the Caribbean. Here are the first wire service reports: from the Associated Press, Reuters, and Agence France-Presse.

... when my turn comes into the air
I will raise up a cry so violent
that I will spatter the sky utterly
and by my shredded branches
and by the insolent jet of my solemn wounded bole

I shall command the islands to exist

-- from "Lost Body", by Aimé Césaire, trans. E. Anthony Hurley

More:

Le Figaro posts a gallery of Césaire images.

Le Monde posts the reactions of senior French politicians, including President Nicolas Sarkozy.

Naipaul, Naipaul, Naipaul

So many reviews of Patrick French's biography The World Is What It Is, each one sounding much like the last--the same repetition of the list of Sir Vidia's sins, with emphasis on his marital life and sex "secrets", garnished by comments on the monstrousness of the man, and largely simplifying the subtleties, complexities, and ironies of the book. I was half in mind to do a follow-up roundup of TWIWIS coverage, but it's too exhausting to contemplate anything comprehensive--so I'll link to just a couple more reviews. First Hilary Spurling's in the UK Observer, which is illustrated with what is now my favourite photo of Naipaul, by Eamonn McCabe:



Second, Sunil Khilnani's review in Outlook India, which incisively describes what he calls French's "myth-puncturing"--his careful consideration of the uncomfortable but very human truths behind Naipaul's artfully crafted public persona. Khilnani concludes:

Naipaul came to perfect this stance: controlling a situation by appearing helpless, then getting others to do his bidding--while making them feel that they were doing it inadequately. In this biography, however, this method has failed him. This may be an authorised biography, but it is firmly and in every sense in Patrick French's control--and he has written a superb account of the life, as what it is. Now, knowing the myth, having read the life, one goes back to the work. That is Naipaul's monument. We are many, who lead less than exemplary lives; but very few are able to turn the matter of their lives into great work. Naipaul, as Patrick French lets us still better see, is one of them.

Meanwhile, it is announced today that TWIWIS has been longlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction, sponsored by the BBC.

"Somewhere in the Zone"

Over at Amazon's Omnivoracious blog, Brad Thomas Parsons has not only managed to snag a post-Pulitzer interview with Junot Diaz--he actually has the opening passage of Diaz's current work-in-progress, "Dark America", which starts:

I'm somewhere in the Zone, traveling on top of an transport. Bound for City.

The only City there is....

"Who knows when it will ever see the light of day again," says Diaz, making it sound like his readers will have to wait another eleven years....

Don't forget Shiva

From the midst of the flood of Naipaul-biography coverage, Nilanjana S. Roy reminds us, in the pages of the India Business Standard, about "The Other Naipaul Boy"--V.S.'s brother Shiva:

I remember The Fireflies and The Chip-Chip Gatherers as well-turned but slight novels, and the passage of years has preserved them well without transmuting them into classics. Both were set in Trinidad; for both Naipauls, the island that one sought to escape and the other sought to explore was a necessary source of material. The Fireflies offered a haunting image to set against the plight of those who couldn’t get away: fireflies trapped in a bottle, casting a beautiful light, but unable to find an escape. The Chip-Chip Gatherers has often been compared to V S Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas, to its detriment. It is clear from both novels, though, that Shiva had a way of seeing that was very much his own, and a fascination with the politics of identity that would never leave him.

(Small quibble--that should be Fireflies, no definite article....)

R.I.P. E.A. Markham, 1 October, 1939-23 March, 2008

I am shocked and saddened this morning to hear of the death of the Montserrat-born writer E.A. "Archie" Markham, via an email circulated by his publishers, Peepal Tree Press. Here is the text of that announcement:

"We have just received the sudden and shocking news of the death of E.A. (Archie) Markham in Paris on 23rd March, Easter day.

"Archie had apparently been taken to or gone to a Paris hospital where he died, it seems, of a heart attack. It was not until Monday 6th of April that news of his death was discovered by his family. As a hale 69 year old who was always on the move, no-one was too alarmed not to have heard from him for a week or two.

"As publishers of Archie's novel Marking Time, his retrospective collection of stories Taking the Drawing Room Through Customs, and just having sent his memoir, Against the Grain, due for publication later this month, to the printers, Archie has long been a part of our life, and over the last few months a regular presence either in the office or on the phone. It was always both an education and a joy to work with him. He was generous (we still have a bottle of good St Emilion awaiting an occasion), particular (he was still emailing small alterations -- which always improved the text -- right up to the last time we heard from him just before Easter) and immense fun when he was in the office.

"We know that there was so much more that Archie planned to write. In every way we feel deprived. There is so much more we want to say, but that needs more thought. In the meantime we send our deepest regrets to Archie's family and know that there will be many of our friends who will share our huge shock and sense of loss."

Archie Markham was also a member of the CRB's editorial board, in which role he was a source of strong (if mostly silent) moral support for the magazine. I deeply regret never having the chance to meet him, to match the wry, generous voice of his poems, fiction, and correspondence to the wryly generous man.

Pulitzer for Diaz

The 2008 Pulitzer Prizes have just been announced--and the fiction prize (possibly the most prestigious in American letters) has gone to The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Diaz--one of the CRB's books of the year for 2007, reviewed in our current issue by Marlon James.

Addendum: thanks to Antilles reader Matthew Hunte for pointing me to this recent interview with Diaz in Newsweek. Nice quote:

The Caribbean generally and the island of Hispaniola specifically is the linchpin, the pivot point where the old world swung into the new world. If you want the transformation point, if you want the ground zero where the Old World died and the New World began, it's there. I mean, nothing is more quintessentially American—in the entire span of that description—than the Caribbean and more specifically the Dominican Republic. If you want to be incredibly grandiose, the entire world, we're all the children of what happened in the Caribbean, whether we know it or not. I mean, the extermination of indigenous people, the conquest of the New World, slavery and in some ways the rise of this form of capitalism that we all live under. I mean really the modern world was given rise by what began in the Caribbean.