Verrition?Footnote 1 The last word of Aimé Césaire's “Notebook of a Return to the Native Land” brings the whole incredible poem to an impossible term—or turn.
—James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture (1988)Pour moi, [la pensée] se fait dans la bouche. Mais elle va plus loin, beaucoup plus loin: à travers la bouche, c'est par le mot qu'on touche au fond.
—Aimé Césaire, “Interview with Aimé Césaire by J. Leiner” (1975)For me, thought is made in the mouth. But it goes further, much further: through the mouth, it's by means of the word that we get to the bottom.Footnote 2
Readers of Aimé Césaire's Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (1939–56) have noted for some time that the movement of this most celebrated of long poems plots not only a return, as its title suggests, but also a recherche: a quest for selfhood, roots, and an adequate form of expression for the Black Caribbean subject (Scharfman 30). The central drama of the Cahier hinges as much on a homecoming as it does on a coming-into-language. The poem follows an unnamed speaker—an avatar of the poet—who abandons the metropole for his native Martinique and, in the process, reclaims an African heritage.Footnote 3 By the poem's end, the poet-speaker declares, he and his once prostrate country “sommes debout maintenant” (“are standing upright now”), and the text channels “une voix qui vrille la nuit” (“a voice that pierces through the night”), pronouncing on centuries of colonial oppression and anti-Blackness (152).Footnote 4
Through its staging of the Martinican poet's gradual coming-to-voice, the Cahier names and performs the search for a new poetic idiom—in Césaire's own words, “a new language … a new means of expression” (“Interview” 67). The search for a new langue (meaning both “language” and “tongue”) that organizes the Cahier—a decolonization of French in French from the perspective of a French colonial subject—involves the elaboration of a new lexicon. Indeed, as Brent Hayes Edwards points out, much criticism on the Cahier has focused on the text's linguistic innovation, especially Césaire's extensive use of neologism (1). As the site of the coinage négritude—in addition to numerous other unusual or archaic usages—the Cahier has typically been read as a kind of defense and illustration of what James Clifford called the poet's revolutionary “politics of neologism”: that is, Césaire's unique ability to do the work of revolution, to make readers “confront the limits of their language, or of any single language,” with one novel word (Clifford 175). Following Clifford, critics have tended to characterize Césaire as a poet of neologism, taking the Cahier as an exemplary text for observing his poetics (and politics) of neologism at work.
This critical focus on Césairean neology has had a somewhat obfuscatory effect on thinking through subtler dimensions of Césaire's decolonial poetics and the other kinds of innovative “word-work” in evidence throughout the Cahier (Edwards 1). While the use of neologism is certainly a hallmark of Césaire's poetry, and of modernist poetry more generally, the readiness with which scholars are prepared to read Césaire as a poet of neologism perhaps overemphasizes questions of genesis, leading critics to misclassify archaic or obscure terms as neologisms or hapax legomena. It has meant failing to appreciate how Césaire frequently reinvests and rearticulates existing terms in French, redirecting them toward antiracist and anticolonial ends. This practice—a form of semantic, not formal, neologism—puts Césaire's poetics in conversation with the theoretical texts of other decolonial thinkers such as Frantz Fanon, whose resignifying of French medical terminology “served a specifically diagnostic (and revolutionary) purpose … to combat, on the level of the signifier, what Sartre deemed the ‘unsuitability’ of French to speak about Black realities” (Calhoun 163). Whereas a formal neologism such as négritude (nègre + –itude) relies on the rules of French morphology to transform and reclaim the racial epithet nègre as what Christopher L. Miller has called “one of the key terms of identity formation in the twentieth century” (“(Revised) Birth” 743), Césaire's rehabilitation of existing terms accomplishes something different. It effects, so to speak, a decolonization of language “from the inside.”
This essay rereads the most contested and ambiguous signifier in the text of the Cahier along these lines. Adopting a historical poetics approach, it reconsiders the much-debated question of the poiesis of the supposed neologism and hapax legomenon verrition, which appears at the very end of the Cahier:
Perhaps more than any other word in Césaire's corpus, verrition has generated intense critical scrutiny.Footnote 5 Like négritude, nearly “every one of [its] lexicological elements has been disputed: definition; etymology; date of coining; and person responsible for coining” (Reilly 377). Verrition has long been held to be a term of the poet's own invention, although it had appeared in print before the Cahier, in a nineteenth-century gastronomical treatise, Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin's La physiologie du goût (Hénane, “Note brève” 265–68; Glossaire 138–39), first published in 1825 (dated 1826).
In this essay, I return to verrition as a key term and powerful example of Césaire's revolutionary “word-work,” identifying a number of other likely sources for this supposed neologism, which, in turn, have implications for how we read the end of the Cahier. These sources include a key reference text held in the library of the École Normale Supérieure (ENS), where Césaire was a student: the first major thesaurus of the French language, Prudence Boissière's Dictionnaire analogique de la langue française (1862). In this text, on the very same page as verrition, we find a number of other technical lingual terms employed by Césaire in the Cahier. In the light of these sources, I read the word verrition and the final stanza of the Cahier differently. Rather than analyze verrition as a linguistic anomaly or as an instance of pure “neology,” I build a case for reading verrition back into the text of the poem. I show the term to be a striking, but far from isolated, example of the overdetermined presence of the mouth as an organizing trope in Césaire's text. The word verrition forms the kernel of an underexamined cluster of anatomical metaphors related to the mechanics of speech in the Cahier. Metaphors and motifs of “articulation” (the coordinated movements of the vocal organs) structure some of the most important sections of the work—not least the final stanza, in which the term verrition appears. By multiplying images of the organs of speech production—such as the mouth (bouche), lips (lèvres), tongue (langue), throat (gorge), hard palate (palais), uvula (luette), and hypoglossus (hypoglosse)—and their actions, Césaire frames the epic quest for a new, emancipatory poetics in precise “articulatory” terms. This preoccupation with the physiology of speech is part of the poem's broader decolonizing gesture. Writing at a time when Martinique was still a colony—and, specifically, in the wake of the tricentennial of the island's annexation by France in 1635 (Toto)—even as he wrote against a centuries-long history of slavery and oppression, Césaire focused on physiology, refusing to take for granted the capacity of the colonial subject to speak in the language of the colonizer: perhaps, to speak at all. This is part of what is lost when we consider verrition as an instance of pure neology and fail to situate it within a constellation of related technical articulatory terms.
A Vertiginous Voyage
As Miller has suggested, the Cahier initially dramatizes the Martinican poet-speaker's geographic and linguistic alienation and eventual homecoming by imaginatively renegotiating—indeed, reversing—the Oedipal triangle of France, Martinique, and Africa to interrogate notions of Blackness, Africanness, Frenchness, and conditions of coloniality (French Atlantic Triangle 325–39).Footnote 6 Césaire does this by working within and through the logic of this triangular configuration, that of the French slave trade: writing in French, from the vantage point of the Caribbean island, the poet evokes the ever-absent, phantasmagoric maternal body of the “native” Africa (Miller, French Atlantic Triangle 325–39; Scharfman 30–31). The poem charts an “entirely Atlantic geography,” the contours of which are shaped by intertwined histories of colonization and slavery, as well as by contemporary violence (Miller, French Atlantic Triangle 332).
The Atlantic trajectory of the Cahier is not merely geographic but also thoroughly linguistic. From the opening stanzas of the Cahier, which depict a voiceless and decimated Caribbean basin, to the poem's famous scene of upright enunciation—“Et nous sommes debout maintenant, mon pays et moi” (“And we are now standing, my country and I”; 152 [93])Footnote 7—Césaire's text plots a dizzying (r)evolution from a passive state of speechlessness to the triumphant emergence of a poetic voice. This progression toward a new language is gradual, however. At the outset of the poem, the speaker complains bitterly about his city and its people not having a voice. In its first few stanzas, the Cahier presents an inert and shrunken Caribbean island town ravaged by colonialism and mired in mutism, figuring the people's physical and political stagnation as a total absence of articulate language. The town is “muette” (“mute”; 5 [5]) and “à côté de son vrai cri” (“displaced from its true cry”; 7 [6]). It “ne particip[e] à rien de ce qui s'exprime” (“shar[es] in nothing that is remotely self-expressive”; 9 [8]), characterized by “un vieux silence” (“an old silence”; 3 [2]). In the original, 1939, version of the poem, these images of silence were even more pronounced, since they furnished the poem's opening. Whereas the “definitive” and widely available 1956 edition of the poem memorably opens with an aggressive verbal altercation between the speaker and a white cop (“V'a-t-en, lui disais-je, gueule de flic, gueule de vache” [“Buzz off, I told the man, pig-snout, honkie-snout”]; 1), the original incipit has no reported speech, beginning directly with these anthropomorphic images of the Caribbean archipelago's suffocating silence and stagnation.
One of the inaugural gestures of Césaire's poem, then, is to identify a crisis of linguistic vacuity; the Cahier's early stanzas elaborate a Césairean metaphorics of disarticulation—of linguistic and poetic disjointedness. The genius of the poet, of course, resides in his quasi-miraculous ability to fashion poetic language out of such absence: a radically generative and recuperative project that eventually enables him to fill a linguistic void and to become the voice of the voiceless, the mouth of the mouthless. The poet-speaker says so rather explicitly early on in the poem when he claims to lend his voice, or more precisely his mouth, to the task of bringing unspeakable, and unspeaking, tragedies into the realm of articulate language: “Ma bouche sera la bouche des malheurs qui n'ont point de bouche” (“My mouth will be the mouth of the calamities that have no mouth”; 38 [30]).
Whether conceived in its lyric abstraction as a metaphor for the vox poetica or figured in precise physiological terms, the mouth of the poet emerges as an organizing trope of the Cahier and furnishes the poem with some of its most striking metaphorics, which I examine in some detail toward the end of this essay. But to suggest that the Cahier plots a straightforward movement from voicelessness to speech would be misleading. The journey evoked by Césaire is, as Jane Hiddleston reminds us, always “circuitous and unfinished” (190). The poem's final, stirring signifier, verrition, is a powerful example of this. For even as the Cahier draws to a close, veering toward verrition, its wheeling trajectory comes not to a standstill but rather to a kind of “sweeping stillness”—this is how Gregson Davis translates the perplexing phrase “immobile verrition” (Césaire, Journal 149)—alighting on a paradoxical term that sets the whole thing in motion once more.
A Sweeping Stillness
The concluding stanzas of the Cahier are the poem's imperative envoi, as the poet-speaker visually tracks the wheeling flight of a dove (“Colombe”), commanding it to ascend as the bird's line of flight imprints itself on the poet-speaker's “ancestrale cornée blanche” (“ancestral white cornea”). In the manner of a Baudelairian “elevation,” Césaire's “lécheur de ciel” (“sky-licker”) wings up and away, doubling the poet's own lyric flight at the end of the poem.Footnote 8 The scene is suggestive of Roman augury—a portent ex avibus alites, a sign given “from the wings of birds.” The effect is also typographic, as the white flash of the dove's ascent is “imprinted” onto the whites of the speaker's eye, then swiftly eclipsed as the speaker turns from contemplating the bird's transcendent flight to confront the cavernous fundus of the “great black hole”: a liquid pool in whose dark recesses a tongue, or a language, seems impossibly to stir. This impossible stirring, or “sweeping stillness,” of course, is one way of parsing the strange locution “en son immobile verrition,” a prepositional phrase that is syntactically dependent on the noun phrase, “la langue maléfique de la nuit,” that precedes it. But syntax gets us only so far. If “immobile verrition” describes an action or attribute of Night's tongue, we would be hard-pressed to grasp the precise sense of verrition and its collocation with immobile, a combination that signifies rapid movement and complete stasis simultaneously (Irele 292).
As Carrie Noland, among others, has pointed out, the famous excipit of the Cahier—although it has remained unchanged through subsequent reeditions of the poem—was not the original ending to Césaire's text, but rather a last-minute addition made by the poet in 1939, after his editor at the Parisian review Volontés, Georges Pelorson, requested a new ending shortly before publication (37).Footnote 9 Césaire obliged, providing three new pages of text that he considered “plus vertigineuse et plus finale” (“more vertiginous and more final”; qtd. in Noland 37), as he wrote in a letter to Pelorson.Footnote 10 The final page contained the metaphor “la langue maléfique de la Nuit” (“the malevolent tongue of Night”) and ended with the mystifying term verrition.
Since the Cahier was first published, in 1939, and across all subsequent versions, criticism of the text has turned on, and tirelessly returned to, the poem's enigmatic final word. A singular source of fascination and frustration—a veritable “golem word” (Gil, “Great Black Hole”)—verrition has long “baffled” and “ultimately defeated” readers and translators of the poem (Davis 459). Critics have long held that verrition was a word of the poet's own creation, reportedly coined from the Latin roots vertere (“to turn”) and verrere (“to sweep” [Irele 292; Kesteloot 127]). As such, verrition would be a striking example, akin to négritude, of Césaire's poetics of neologism. In their introduction to Césaire's Collected Poetry, Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith suggest that Césaire more or less confirmed the neologism hypothesis in private correspondence: “Still, only Césaire himself was in a position to reveal (in a private communication) that ‘verrition’ which preceding translators and scholars had interpreted as a ‘flick’ and ‘swirl’ had been coined on a Latin verb ‘verri,’ meaning ‘to sweep,’ ‘to scrape a surface,’ and ultimately ‘to scan’” (26).Footnote 11 Only recently have scholars of the Cahier asked whether Césaire invented the word himself and, if so, when. Just as négritude has been shown not to have originated in the Cahier but several years earlier, in the journal L’étudiant noir (Filostrat; Reilly; Miller, “The (Revised) Birth of Negritude”), the status of verrition as a “pure” neologism and the Cahier as the site of its genesis have come under scrutiny. First in a paper given at a conference organized in honor of Césaire's ninetieth birthday, in 2003 (“Note brève”), then in his Glossaire de termes rares dans l’œuvre d'Aimé Césaire (2004), René Hénane alerted critics to the fact that verrition had appeared in print before the Cahier—in Brillat-Savarin's La physiologie du goût (1826), where the term refers to a sweeping action of the tongue (“Note brève” 265–68; Glossaire 138–39).Footnote 12 Hénane cites Brillat-Savarin's definition: “la langue, se recourbant en dessus ou en dessous, ramasse les portions qui peuvent rester dans le canal demi-circulaire formé par les lèvres et les gencives” (“the tongue, curving on top or underneath, sweeps up the portions [of food] that remain in the semicircular canal formed by the lips and the gums”; Glossaire 138; see also Brillat-Savarin, Physiologie [1848] 20). Verrition, in other words, names a rotational movement in deglutition by which the tongue collects particles of food, forms them into the alimentary bolus, and pushes them toward the back of the mouth.Footnote 13 In “Note brève,” Hénane offers two anecdotal pieces of evidence for taking La physiologie du goût as a possible source for verrition—claims he does not repeat in his Glossaire: first, he had located Brillat-Savarin's text in the library of the ENS, where Césaire had studied between 1935 and 1938, shortly before publishing the first version of the Cahier; second, Hénane evokes a lunch in Châtillon during which Éliane Favier supposedly recalled Césaire's having read, or at least mentioned, Brillat-Savarin (267).
Building on Hénane's account, Noland provides perhaps the most complete analysis of verrition in recent years. In her Voices of Negritude in Modernist Print, Noland mentions Brillat-Savarin's text, but additionally observes “how carefully the word [verrition] … has been anticipated by the sonic landscape of the poem” (39)—namely, by the “startling” number of words in the poem already containing the morpheme ver(s) (186). Noland opens up verrition to a broader semantic field, noting that the final metaphor of the Cahier, “‘la langue maléfique de la nuit,’ takes on new significance when we consider it in light of this source [Brillat-Savarin's La physiologie du goût]. ‘La langue’ referred quite directly to Brillat-Savarin's meaning (‘langue’ as tongue) while opening onto the field of language (‘langue’) as a site of enchantment and transformation” (40).
Scholars of the Cahier have also explored the various maritime resonances of verrition, which resembles the terms vérine (a hook-rope for anchors) and verrine (a binnacle lamp [Miller, French Atlantic Triangle 338]) and also suggests diaphanous transparency, in connection to verre (“glass”). However, given that the final stanza also hints at the poet's entering into (or going fishing in) a “great black hole,” we should add the religious term veyrine or verrine to the catalog of verrition's lexical resonances. Verrine refers to a spiritual and pseudo-medical rite in which individuals were cured of evil or malediction by passing through a “trou miraculeux”: a hole or orifice—in the ground or the wall of a church, for instance—that also bore the name verrine and often became a site of pilgrimage (Gaidoz 41). Césaire's miraculous and nocturnal “grand trou” suggests, perhaps, that the only way out of the darkness of alienation and colonial subjugation is by passing through it.
However, the lexical history of verrition extends well beyond La physiologie du goût, as well as Hénane's and Noland's insightful analyses. Although Brillat-Savarin seems to have been the first to use the word in French, Césaire may have come across the term in a number of other sources not identified or mentioned by Hénane or Noland.Footnote 14 The term verrition seems to have been taken up quickly in medical discourse and crops up in many nineteenth-century physiologies and anatomical texts, where, following Brillat-Savarin, it is used to describe a particular lingual gesture by which the tongue sweeps up debris. It appears, for instance, in Antoine Magistel's 1828 medical treatise on the anatomy of the tongue, Considérations sur l'anatomie et la physiologie de la langue (25). And, in a striking scientific analog to Césaire's avian “lécheur de ciel” (“sky-licker”), verrition also appears in Joannes Chatin's comparative anatomy Les organes des sens (1880) in a discussion of the tongues of birds (185).
The medical context of historical occurrences of verrition should not be taken for granted. In his investment in technical anatomical and physiological terminology, Césaire suggests that the body at issue in the Cahier is not only the visceral body of the slave or the abject colonial subject but also a medicalized conception of the Black body, produced as an object of pseudo-scientific knowledge. Behind technical terms like verrition looms the specter of colonial science. In this vein, it seems equally important to point out that verrition denotes a specifically human function of the tongue—a lingual movement, as Brillat-Savarin writes, that is “unknown” among other animal species (Physiologie [1848] 20). It appears in a chapter (or “méditation”) titled “Suprématie de l'homme” (“the supremacy of man”; Physiologie [1848] 20). Chatin's anatomy confirms this, noting that birds’ tongues, being quite limited in their range of mobility, are entirely incapable of performing the movement of verrition that can be observed in humans. Césaire's “lécheur de ciel,” in other words, would not be capable of the movement of verrition accomplished by “night's tongue”; the poet-speaker, however, would be. The distinction here is subtle but significant: as I show later on in the essay, much of the “articulatory” and lingual imagery in evidence throughout the Cahier is anthropomorphous in nature—dealing with mouth-like openings, gullets, and animal snouts. The final signifier of the Cahier, by contrast, defines a fundamentally human capacity of the “langue” (“tongue”), one that elevates the human tongue above its bestial corollary and “announces the sublimity of the operations for which it is destined” (Brillat-Savarin, Physiologie [1848] 20). Besides a refined sense of “taste” (Brillat-Savarin's concern in the Physiologie), the foremost of these sublime “operations,” of course, would be a capacity for (poetic) speech. Attending to the anatomical resonances of verrition allows us to appreciate more fully Césaire's grafting and resignification of French scientific terminology drawn from nineteenth-century physiologies.
In addition to appearing in Brillat-Savarin's Physiologie and nineteenth-century medical texts, verrition can be found in far less obscure sources, including a number of French dictionaries that were published in multiple editions: namely, Louis-Nicolas Bescherelle's Dictionnaire national ou Dictionnaire universel de la langue française (1856), Jean-Baptiste-Prudence Boissière's Dictionnaire analogique de la langue française: Répertoire complet des mots par les idées et des idées par les mots (1862), and Paul Guérin's Dictionnaire des dictionnaires (1895).Footnote 15 Boissière's Dictionnaire analogique, in particular, was a key reference text—the first major thesaurus of the French language—and was held in the collections of the ENS library when Césaire was a student; it also was reedited by Charles Maquet, and a new edition was published by Larousse in 1936, just three years before the publication of the first version of the Cahier.
It thus seems increasingly dubious to consider Césaire's use of verrition as a case of “pure” neology. It even seems feasible that Césaire would have consulted Boissière's Dictionnaire analogique in search of synonyms or technical terms to elaborate his “politics of neologism” in evidence throughout the poem, or as he endeavored to write a new finale on Pelorson's request in 1939, since the dictionary groups terms thematically, as semantic clusters. In fact, in the Dictionnaire analogique, verrition is defined three times, each time with its own entry. It appears first under the headword balai (“broom, sweep”), where it is described as a specifically lingual “action de balayer” (“sweeping motion”) and followed by the example “la langue fait quelquefois dans la bouche un mouvement de verrition” (“the tongue sometimes makes a movement of verrition in the mouth”; Boissière 100). The term is listed again under manger ou nourrir (“to eat”), with the definition “quand la langue ramasse ce qui est mâché” (“when the tongue sweeps up what is chewed”; 876). It occurs a third time under the conceptual heading langue (“tongue”), where it is defined as the movement “par lequel la langue ramasse les aliments” (“by which the tongue sweeps up pieces of food”; 806). In other words, instead of fortuitously stumbling across the term in a gastronomical treatise, Césaire could have gone looking in the major thesaurus of French for words related to sweeping actions (balai, balayer), to food and nourishment (manger, nourrir), or to the tongue and language (la langue) to complete the final stanza: any of these lexical searches would have led him straight to the word verrition.
What makes the Dictionnaire analogique an especially likely source for Césaire's use of the word verrition in the Cahier, even more so than the Physiologie du goût, is the fact that, under the heading langue in the Dictionnaire, verrition appears grouped alongside a number of other technical articulatory terms, all of which Césaire uses at least once in the 1956 version of the Cahier, including hypoglosse (“hypoglossus”), lèche (“lick”), luette (“uvula”), lingual, and papillaire (“lingual papillae”).Footnote 16 Most relevant to an analysis of the final stanza, verrition is listed in the Dictionnaire directly below the term trou, which is not defined as “hole”—as it is always parsed and translated in Césaire's poem—but according to its technical usage in articulatory anatomy as the “borgne, à la base de la langue” (“hollow at the base of the tongue”).
This technical use of the common noun trou allows us to reconsider the functioning of the term in the Cahier's final stanza as well as its semantic affinity with verrition. The “grand trou noir” (“great black hole”) in which the poet fishes for a nocturnal langue in its movement of verrition is actually a pharyngeal place of articulation. It is the trou or trou borgne (“depression, hollow”) at the back of the oral cavity near the very base of the tongue, the root of the hypoglossus. Earlier in the poem, the hypoglosse is a site of deadly potential aboard a slave ship, when Césaire evokes the image of an enslaved man choking himself to death “avec complicité de son hypoglosse en retournant sa langue pour l'avaler” (“with complicity of his hypoglossus by shoving his tongue backward in order to swallow it”; 15 [14]). Now, at the end of the poem, the specter of suicide remains—“je voulais me noyer l'autre lune” (“I longed to drown myself the other moon”)—but ultimately is displaced by a recuperative desire: to fish out Night's tongue, to recover a nocturnal language. The final image of the Cahier sees the poet turning away from the lyric flight of the Dove to confront something darker, but more generative. Contrary to its translation, the “grand trou noir” with which Césaire closes his Cahier is no ordinary “great black hole” but rather the true locum: the oral cavity, the dark recess from which poetic speech arises.
The constellation of technical articulatory terms that Césaire mobilizes in this stanza and throughout the poem, and that all appear alongside verrition in Boissière's thesaurus, allow us to reread the finale of the Cahier with greater precision. Verrition powerfully inscribes Césaire's concern for articulation on the level of the poem's final and most ambiguous signifier. The term, which denotes a specifically human lingual action, suggests that the “word-work” of the Cahier's poetic revolution is accomplished by la langue not as poetic abstraction but as poetic instrument. This investment in the physiology of speech connects language-as-articulation to the poem's broader decolonizing impetus: the speaker's desire for revolutionary “rectitude.” This focus on anatomy reflects the Cahier's decolonizing and revolutionary poetic action, by which Césaire's revalorizing new négritude is expressed in terms of the power of locomotion and ultimately analogized to able-bodiedness: the possibility of movement from a horizontal state of stagnation to an upright position of enunciation, from boue (“mud”) to debout (“standing” [Flaugh 294]). The sweeping term verrition names the poem's inaugural action, its condition of possibility: the raising and unfurling of the tongue to speak.
The Verritions of “Ma Bouche”Footnote 17
I now want to briefly sketch the ways in which verrition is anticipated in the poem not merely by a diffuse “sonic landscape,” as Noland suggests (39), but by a more obvious and consistent patterning of tropes related to articulation, deglutition, and the mechanics of speech that so far has gone underexamined in scholarship on the Cahier. While the Cahier would seem to end in what Malachi McIntosh has called a total “maelstrom of confusion” (90), the text of the poem itself quite carefully prepares us to read the final stanza and the word verrition in the terms delineated above—namely, as a reverberating oral cavity and an example of the overdetermined presence of the mouth and vocal apparatus observable throughout the poem.
To the extent that the Cahier names (and ultimately resolves) the initial absence of a suitable form of expression in French for the colonial subject, it makes sense that anxiety over this originary linguistic “lack” or void would manifest itself in the poem as a multitude of symbols, images, and tropes of articulation.Footnote 18 In apotropaic fashion, the myriad vocal organs with which Césaire populates the Cahier, right up to the final stanza, mitigate the fearsome abyss of silence, mutism, and speechlessness that confronts the speaker at the beginning of the poem as he contemplates his stagnant and silent island town with bitter disillusionment. In the circuitous course of the poem, as the poet-speaker gradually recovers and reclaims a disalienated voice, the articulatory imagery of the Cahier effectively runs the gamut of buccal images and lingual metaphors, representing not only the transcendent poetic bouche—the conveyor of a lyric voice—but also the mouth-as-orifice, reduced to its basic animal anatomy.
Much of the Cahier's articulatory imagery is anthropomorphous or autoscopic in nature: self-reflexive tropes that serve to figure the Caribbean environment as an animate entity in its own right or to further dramatize the poet-speaker's own lyrical fusion with the island topography. An example of the former is Césaire's memorable turn of phrase “la grand'lèche hystérique de la mer” (“the hysterical licking of the sea”; 22 [21]), which prepares the Cahier's extended canine metaphor, through which the turbulent sea is compared to the foaming maw of a giant, devouring dog. This Caribbean Cerberus licks and bites at the ocean's legs, recalling the “chiens mangeurs de nègres” (“slave-eating dogs”)—hounds used throughout the Antilles during the time of slavery to chase down and maim runaway slaves:
la mer est un gros chien qui lèche et mord la plage aux jarrets, et à force de la mordre elle finira par la dévorer, bien sûr, la plage et la rue Paille avec
the sea is a giant dog that licks and bites the sea at its shins, and by dint of repeated biting it will devour it in the end—the beach no less than Straw Street (31 [28])
An example of the latter would be Césaire's description of the poet-speaker's autoscopic fusion with the crenelated island ring—a moment of anagnorisis, added to the poem in the 1947 edition famously praised (and prefaced) by André Breton. Here, the speaker apostrophizes the eroticized archipelago, caressing with oceanic hands, licking with an algal tongue, and speaking in trade-wind words:
Îles annelées, unique carêne belle
Et je te caresse de mes mains d'océan. Et je te vire de mes paroles alizées. Et je te lèche de mes langues d'algues.
Et je te cingle hors-flibuste.
Islands forming a ring, beautiful keel unique
And I caress you with my ocean hands. And I make you tack with my trade-wind words. And I lick you with my tongues of seaweed.
And I steer you free of buccaneers. (142–43)
Césaire's dazzlingly (and dizzyingly) dense metaphorics in these stanzas charts not only a humanoid geography but also an entire oceanic articulatory anatomy—imagery that, not long before the poem's end, anticipates the poem's final image of the avian “sky-licker” and cavernous “hole.” Césaire's unusual formulation “unique carêne belle” (“beautiful keel unique”) to describe the annulated island arc evokes the hull or keel of a ship—and this is how it usually is translated and glossed—but more precisely names the anatomical carêne: the avian breastbone or, in humans, the articulated ridge of cartilage in the trachea that protects the larynx. Césaire's carêne is the very channel that conducts the poet's Africa-bound “trade-wind” breath from the lungs through the vocal tract before it passes over “a seaweed tongue” and becomes speech.
Not all the articulatory imagery of the Cahier is so affirmative. A significant change between the 1939 edition of Cahier and subsequent versions of the poem involves a number of articulatory metaphors that Césaire added to the poem, as early as the 1947 Bordas edition, and that function as explicit statements about the (im)possibility of speech in relation to colonial violence and anti-Blackness. What Abiola Irele has parsed as the poem's main speech act of “counteraccusation” (215) is exemplary in this respect, and it allows us to grasp more fully the “stakes” of Césaire's preoccupation with the materiality of speech in the Cahier:
Mais qui tourne ma voix? qui écorche ma voix? Me fourrant dans la gorge mille crocs de bambou. Mille pieux d'oursin. C'est toi, sale bout de monde. Sale bout de petit matin. C'est toi sale haine. C'est toi poids de l'insulte et cent ans de coups de fouet.
But who is twisting my voice? who is flaying my voice? Shoving into my throat a thousand bamboo hooks. A thousand sea-needle stakes. It is you foul end of the world. Foul end of foreday morning. It is you foul hate. It is you, onus of insult and a hundred years of lashings with the whip. (65)
The speaker's “counteraccusation” in this stanza takes the shape of naming acts of violence that maim and mutilate the vocal tract: a flaying of the poetic voice by wooden hooks shoved down the throat—a mutilation that then takes on Caribbean resonances when the stake-like protrusions (pieux) reappear as the spines of a sea urchin (oursin).Footnote 19 In Césaire's depictions of violence carried out on the organs of speech, we might read both a vehement critique of the oppressive discursive conditions from which the colonial subject is made to speak in the present and a precise historical allusion to methods of slave torture such as bits, gags, and the mutilation of the vocal organs.Footnote 20 Césaire's framing of colonial oppression and anti-Blackness in terms of linguistic aggressions and compromised speech dramatizes a radical foreclosure of language, showing the body and language of the colonial subject to be historically constituted through colonizing violence. His focus on the physiology of the mouth and the vocal organs precisely names linguistic and bodily violence rooted in anti-Blackness while pointing to the revolutionary unbinding of the tongue that the Cahier eventually performs.
One of the Cahier's most striking symbols of latent linguistic potential is the Caribbean island's ballistic morne, a term that is used throughout the Antilles to designate a hillock or small volcanic mountain, and that resonates with the history of French slavery as a famous site of marronage, or escape from the plantation. Césaire figures the explosive potential of the morne in articulatory terms, as a malfunction of the vocal organs. At the beginning of the poem, its contained blaze is “comme un sanglot que l'on a bâillonné au bord de son éclatement sanguinaire” (“like a sob gagged on the verge of a bloody outburst”; 13 [12]). In addition to being inexpressive, the Cahier's mount is “accroupi devant la boulimie” (“stooped in front of its bulimia”): “vomissant ses fatigues d'hommes” (“vomiting its tired humanity”), regurgitating but not yet reverberating (14 [13]). The parallel to the speaker's own condition is clear: much like the morne verging on eruption, he initially chokes back words and suppresses an animal howl: “il y a sous la reserve de ma luette une bauge de sangliers” (“beneath the preserve of my uvula there lurks a wild boars’ wallow”; 112). In a text so concerned with the ability of poetic language to do the work of decolonial revolution, one must wonder if these stifled sounds—these animal bellows held in the back of the throat or churning deep belowground—are in fact the phonic material that will become, by the poem's end, the clear and piercing voice that finally “erupts” in the enunciation “ma négritude” (124).
Césaire's attention to the vocal tract in his extended mountain metaphor, and specifically to perversions or reversals of its “natural” function (spitting up rather than ingesting, holding back noise rather than letting it out), prepares the subsequent image of a suicidal body colluding with its hypoglossus to invert and swallow the tongue. Alluding to the history of enslaved persons who committed suicide by training themselves to choke on their tongues, Césaire reverses the symbolic function of the mouth (as locus of language, subjectivity, poetry), figuring it instead in terms of its technical (and deadly) anatomy. He transforms la langue and the throat from instruments of speech into mechanisms of resistance and death.
As the poem progresses, the vocal tract is conceived in markedly less violent terms. From a stifled cry and a tortured voice that was “twisted” and “flayed” by colonial violence and anti-Blackness, the poem gradually moves us toward efficacious language and the elaboration of a generative new idiom. A number of stanzas added to the 1947 Cahier reflect explicitly on the vocal tract as the source of linguistic renewal, framing the throat and vocal apparatus as the vehicle for a new poetic language:
En vain dans la tiédeur de votre gorge mûrissez-vous vingt fois la même pauvre consolation que nous sommes des marmonneurs de mots.
Des mots? Quand nous manions des quartiers de monde, quand nous épousons des continents en délire … des mots, ah oui, des mots! Mais des mots de sangs frais, des mots qui sont des raz-de-marée et des érésipèles et des paludismes et des laves et des feux de brousse, et des flambées de chair, et des flambées de villes. …
In vain in your lukewarm gullet you keep on nurturing the same poor consolation that we are people who just mumble words.
Words? When we handle whole regions of the globe, when we marry continents in delirium … words, ah yes, words! but fresh-blooded words, words that are tsunamis and erysipelas malarial fevers and lava flows and brush fires, and burnings of flesh, and burnings of cities. … (71–72)
The interlocutor's throat (“votre gorge”), which harbors racist convictions about the linguistic inferiority of African languages, is counterpoised with the speaker's own effusive monologue: an alliterative stream of words that bubbles up and overflows in a paratactic feat of articulatory gymnastics. For Irele, these stanzas contain the Cahier's “clearest statement of the nature and purpose of the Black poet's relationship to language” (219).
How exactly this new poetic language will emerge becomes clearer a few stanzas later in one of the Cahier’s most striking images of linguistic (and alimentary) regeneration:
In his reading of this stanza, Miller suggests that the Cahier renews the French language by “seizing” hold of it, glossing Césaire's colloquial formulation “prendre langue avec”—which means “to make contact with” or “to inform oneself,” but literarily translates as “to take tongue/language with”—as a revolutionary gesture of appropriation (French Atlantic Triangle 338). Such a reading certainly resonates with the final movement of the poem, in which the speaker “fishes” out the tongue of Night. But Césaire's formulation “prendre langue avec la dernière angoisse” also makes a fundamentally historical claim: namely, that the Cahier's “renewal” of poetic language can only come about by “making contact” with past suffering (angoisse). Put another way, the poet's shrinking lyric persona (“moi oh, rien que moi”), which “makes contact” with the “last anguish,” sounds the depths of suffering to sound out a new language.
The “last anguish” with which Césaire communes as he “seizes” the French language is, like the first drops of virginal milk, a regenerative elixir to be lapped up by a worn-out tongue in need of a new idiom. Nourished by drops of virgin milk (an image of the Virgo lactans), the poet now is prepared for his feat of linguistic transubstantiation. Indeed, what follows is the Cahier's “blood-red” passage—“Que de sang dans ma mémoire!” (“Nothing but blood in my memory!”; 82 [40])—in which the poet laments a memory-scape strewn with bodies and bathed in blood. However, he ultimately resolves to creatively mine and transform a bloody terrain of traumatic, “anguished” histories—most pressingly those of slavery and colonization—in order to inaugurate his new poetics.
This transformative lyric praxis is most spectacularly evident in Césaire's description of la cale, the hold of the slave ship, which gives rise to its own grim phonetic inventory—an onomatopoetic cacophony of the dead and dying. The passage was present in the earliest version of the Cahier and remained unchanged in subsequent versions of the poem. Perhaps more so than any other articulatory image in the Cahier, the sonorous hold of the slave ship directly prefigures the cavernous “grand trou noir” of the poem's finale. Above deck, the poet is “earwitness” to an alliterative outpouring of noise from the hold, which—much like the “grand trou”—is conceived as a massive oral cavity emitting a strange and fearsome glossolalia:
J'entends de la cale monter les malédictions enchaînées, les hoquettements des mourants, le bruit d'un qu'on jette à la mer … les abois d'une femme en gésine … des raclements d'ongles cherchant des gorges … des ricanements de fouet … des farfouillis de vermine parmi des lassitudes. …
I hear rising from the hold the curses in chains, the hiccupping of the dying, the sound of a slave being thrown overboard … the baying of a woman in labor … the scrapings of fingernails groping for throats … the tauntings of the whips … the rummaging of vermin amid the spells of exhaustion. … (96 [51])
A “vessel” in the fullest sense, Césaire's ventriloquial cale sounds out and resounds with the horrors of the Middle Passage. Indeed, the etymology of cale itself invites such a reading, harboring an articulatory meaning of its own—derived from fale, meaning “gullet” or “crop.” The phonic material of the Cahier, in other words, is furnished, in part, by excavating the spectral sounds of slavery. The suggestion is that, before the triumphant emergence of négritude out of darkness and silence, the poet must learn to speak with (and in) the disarticulated “tongue” of the hold.
“Something Torn and New”
In its preoccupation with the anatomy of the mouth and vocal organs, the Cahier ultimately can be seen to reframe what typically has been considered a problem of enunciation—the (im)possibility of poetic expression in French for the colonial subject, which is a problem of language (langue)—as one of articulation: that is, at bottom, something the tongue (la langue) does. Césaire stages his linguistic and poetic revolt against (neo)colonial oppression, racism, and anti-Blackness in precise articulatory terms that ground the poem's decolonizing impetus in the physiology of human speech. In doing so, he throws into sharp relief the sine qua non of poetic expression for the colonial subject: the capacity to arrange the vocal organs toward efficacious language and to access the full potential of la bouche. The swallowed tongues and maimed vocal organs with which Césaire populates the earliest passages of the Cahier initially can only answer, to borrow Roger Reeves's phrasing, “as all severed tongues do”—that is, with silence. Césaire fashions poetic language out of the void by fishing for a new tongue—or perhaps, resurrecting an old one.
The term verrition reflects this broader concern of the Cahier with articulation as liberatory poetic practice. The poem's finale channels and distills a complex matrix of buccal images and lingual metaphors in evidence throughout the poem—tropes that meticulously prepare the poem's final image of “le grand trou noir,” the metaphor “la langue maléfique de la nuit,” and the striking term verrition. Rereading the text of the Cahier through the lens of articulation additionally sheds light on the development of the poem between the 1939 and 1956 versions. From the survey of articulatory images discussed here, we can observe that from the original version of the poem published in Volontés to the “definitive” Présence Africaine edition, references to the mouth and its physiology increase over time, as do the number of technical articulatory words (such as luette and papillaire, which appear in the 1947 and 1956 versions but not the 1939 edition), as Césaire progressively frames the linguistic stakes of his project in more and more precise and compelling terms (examples of this being stanzas 65, 71–72, and 79).
The textual antecedents for verrition identified in this essay do not discount Hénane's thesis, nor do they necessarily displace Brillat-Savarin as a possible source for verrition, but they do further demystify the term and provide a far more complete picture of the lexical history of verrition before its appearance in the Cahier. They also shed light on a number of other technical or archaic usages in the Cahier, placing Césaire's neologistic “word-work” in even closer relation to nineteenth-century science and further confirming Césaire's well-known “predilection for combing the recesses of the dictionary to unearth the word-work that thickens his verse (homonyms, foreign language grafts, invented words, obscure idioms, rare and technical terms, especially botanical and biological designations)” (Edwards 1). That verrition is not a neologism of Césaire's own invention but rather a technical term culled from nineteenth-century sources is significant. The word's poiesis—not a neoformation outright, but rather the rehabilitation and rearticulation of an existing scientific term—reflects an underexamined aspect of Césaire's politics of neologism: his predilection for imbuing old words with new meaning. Rather than a lexical aberration, the mystifying final word of the Cahier is a distillation of Césaire's revolutionary poetics of articulation into a single, stirring signifier. To echo Kamau Brathwaite, by removing verrition from its original anatomical context and grafting it onto the striking finale of his Cahier, Césaire creates something that is both “torn and new.”
