The postcolonial poetics of Aime and Suzanne Cesaire, contemporaries of Marcuse, aligned their politics with the Surrealist movement grounded in France in the 1930’s. The two writers from Martinique had been studying in Paris at the peak Surrealist heyday and were moved through Andre Breton’s inspiration of an aesthetics on canvas and poetry displaying a movement using art as a means to fight the violent realism of World War II. Aime and Suzanne’s surrealist innovation helped them ‘enable the transcendence from the sordid dichotomies of the present,’ not just in Europe, but at home in the French colonized Martinique. “Surrealism nourished our impatient strength towards life and a permanent readiness for the marvelous” (Suzanne Cesaire).
In Aime Cesaire’s poetry Notebook of a Return to my Native Land, the poet reflects on his return visit from France to Martinique in 1939. He saw that while the Nazi Army had disabled the French nation in Europe, the French had learned no lessons from the German occupation because those French sailors, thousands of them, who harbored in the Caribbean, remained just as racist and brutally controlling over the native population. The ungrateful refugees could not learn that treating any human, as a second rate human, would not help France overcome fascism at home or their own fascism abroad.
For Aime Cesaire, “Poetry is the only way to achieve the kind of knowledge needed to move beyond the World’s crisis … Poetic knowledge is born in the great silence of scientific knowledge” (Cesaire). Poetics is crucial to move forward since the sciences do not always have all the answers to life’s most difficult questions.
A fourth contemporary of Herbert Marcuse, Aime and Suzanne Cesaire is Adrienne Rich. Her involvement in the Non-Standardized Woman’s Movement is a third revolutionary act discussed here in where poetics and aesthetics are vital. Quoting W.H. Auden reflecting on her poetry, in her essays entitled What is Found There, “Radical changes and significant novelty in artistic style can only occur when there has been a radical change in human sensibility to require them.” She continues shortly after with another quote by Leslie Marmon Silko, “No need to ever have limited it to so few sensibilities, so few visions of what might be in the world;” limits to gender, sexual preference, race, politics, art, and battle cries cannot remain in a domain with perimeters conscious or unconscious without force. To overcome such limitations, one must be “Shocked out of innocence into politics!” (Rich).
The Surrealists used shock for such purposes to shock their audience into a new understanding of the horrific present. The surrealism manifested in Aime Cesaire’s work attempted to reclaim an authentic character, his African and Caribbean heritage. Such a process was a detoxification his consciousness needed to emancipate (Rene Despestre).
“I became a poet by renouncing poetry. Surrealism interested me to the extent that it was a liberating factor. It was a weapon to explode the French language” (Cesaire). Aime believes that a civilization that proves incapable of solving the problems that it creates is a decadent civilization, while Herbert Marcuse explains that a declining civilization is only capable of producing decadent art. Art with a revolutionary discord creates an emergence of another reasoning. This new revolutionary reasoning defies rationally determinant and dominant institutional sensibility, to create a new sensibility (Marcuse). But this revolutionary attack of accepted diameters is not a pessimistic art, it is not a pessimistic poetics, nor is it counter-evolutionary. Compared to the one-dimensional consumer pop-art that is propaganda to passive acceptance, “It serves to warn against the overly ‘happy consciousness of accepted praxis.' Art cannot abolish social division of labor, but it can disassociate the production process of domination, and it can make conscious the necessity for change” (Marcuse).
At the forefront of Adrienne Rich’s message, aligned with her friend and poet Audre Lorde’s title piece Poetry is Not a Luxury, “our move toward Change, there is only poetry to hint at possibility made real. Poetry is not a luxury,” because it is our weapon to open the limits of an imposed interpretation of freedom. Poetry and Art have always provided the necessary outlet to deviate from conventional vices. Adrienne Rich in agreement with Cesaire and Marcuse, inspired by Raya Dunayevskaya, “Raya Dunayevskaya wrote of a revolution that while ‘great divides in epochs in cognition, in personality, are crucial,’ we need to understand the moment of discontinuity – break in the pattern – itself as part of a continuity, for it becomes a turning point in history” (Rich).
Adrienne Rich reiterates this in her use of Irena Klepfisz’s poetry, where “from the urban plant that sensualizes the apartment where two women make love, or the fiercely generative tangle of narcissus roots in a glass jar, to a garden of wildflowers transplanted with uneven success … There is a tough and searching empathy, Klepfisz writes sometimes from cities where a windowbox, a potted plant, a zoo, an arboretum become ‘mnemonic devices’ for the natural world” (Rich). These mnemonic devices assist in displacing the flow of accepted understanding, and invent a poetics to alternate what acts pass our understanding eye, much like the acceptance of a clock dripping in a Salvador Dali painting that displaces our understanding of time, or a Hans Bellmer photograph testing our accepted uses of contortioned dolls.
A true postcolonial radical will tell you that his country is not yet ‘postcolonial’ because the official apparatus of political, economic, and cultural links remains tied to and with mere alterations to the Western discourse of set footprints and Neocolonial terminology. Aesthetic sublimation can change when the rebellious rebirth of subjectivity invokes a de-sublimation of perception and it transcends to a critical level of awareness. This is where and when the social nexus of submission has been broken (Marcuse). Such spontaneous acts in poetics and aesthetics, not only will liberate former colonies, but also the dominant determination in the developed nations that hold onto limited parameters of freedom on gender, race, sexual preference, economics, and expression. “Life dissipates; its living trace dissolves” (Assia Djebar). Find the unnamable and Break the nexus. Aesthetics and Poetics are a revolutionary tool, it has assisted passionate voices throughout historic hard times, and it will work as an outlet time and time again.
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