Please activate JavaScript!
Please install Adobe Flash Player, click here for download
ePaper created 2014-06-21, 10:32:49 | version 1.31.00
Untimely Vision 117 Cooperative federalism would overcome colonialism and transcend the false choice between departmentalization and independence by sublating the cen- tralized nation-state, or what Senghor called the unitary republic. Once again Césaire pursued the promise of decolonization without national independence. Just as departmentalization was meant to reawaken the future past of Schoelcher’s utopian vision of abolition, Césaire now sought, through federalism, to extend the not yet realized promises for social equality and political emancipation that were condensed in his original program for departmentalization. And like its prede- cessors, this new arrangement was meant to be provisional and self-surpassing. Césaire emphasized that his current support for federalism depended on the situ- ation that existed “in the present moment” and that he could not “prejudge future evolution.”43 If conditions changed, cooperative federalism might have to be negated and transcended as well. The Legacy of Louverture Just as Césaire’s earlier vision of departmentalization was mediated by the spirit of Schoelcher and the legacy of abolition in 1848, his program for federal auton- omy was mediated by the spirit of Louverture and the legacy of the 1790s revo- lution in Saint-Domingue. Césaire first visited Haiti for a seven-month stay at the invitation of the French surrealist writer Pierre Mabille, then conseiller cul- turel with the French embassy there. While in Haiti he delivered his important philosophico-poetic treatise, “Poésie et connaissance,” in September 1944 at the Congrès International de Philosophie in Port-au-Prince.44 Reflecting on this visit sixty years later, Césaire recalled feeling overwhelmed by the cautionary example of “this terribly complex society. . . . Most of all in Haiti I saw what should not be done! A country that had conquered its liberty, that had conquered its indepen- dence, and which I saw was more miserable than Martinique, a French colony! . . . It was tragic, and that could very well happen to us Martinicans as well.”45 Liberté 2: Nation et voie africaine du socialisme (Liberty 2: Nation and the African Way of Social- ism) (Paris: Seuil, 1971). 43. Césaire, “Pour la transformation,” 488. 44. Roger Toumson and Simonne Henry-Valmore, Aimé Césaire: Le nègre inconsolé (Aimé Césaire: The Unconsoled Negro) (La Roque d’Anthéron: Vents d’Ailleurs, 2002), 95 – 97. Césaire’s “Poésie et connaissance” (“Poetry and Knowledge”) was then published in Tropiques, no. 12 (1945), and reprinted in Tropiques, 1941 – 1945, 157 – 70. 45. Aimé Césaire, Nègre je suis, nègre je resterai: Entretiens avec Françoise Vergès (Negro I Am, Negro I Will Remain: Discussions with Françoise Vergès) (Paris: Michel, 2005), 56.