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ePaper created 2014-06-21, 10:32:49 | version 1.31.00
Public Culture 14 0 descends down to the coral at the bottom of the sea.” Especially effective was how Maximin alternated between speaking casually, affectionately, and directly to Césaire in the familiar tu form about various stages of his life and orchestrating Césaire’s presence through dramatic readings of his poetry and plays by speak- ers from Martinique, Guadeloupe, Senegal, and Haiti. Between each recitation Maximin would declare, “Césaire, beloved, speak now [Césaire, aimé, parole due].”90 His descendants thus addressed the living spirit of Césaire in the very way that Césaire himself had conjured and engaged the spirits of Schoelcher and Louverture.91 As Césaire’s casket was taken away to the cemetery, the mourning public gathered in the stadium continued to chant “Béïa pour Césaire” (Long live Césaire). Not only the form of the funeral but the content of Maximin’s moving com- mentary enacted Césaire’s legacy by evoking the indissociable relations between Martinican specificity and universal humanity, violence and reconciliation, suf- fering and hope, poetic imagination and political engagement, aesthetic freedom and social justice, rootedness and anticipation, loss and life, remembrance and renovation. The issue of historical temporality was further underscored when Maximin reminded the audience that what Césaire wanted above all for Marti nique was not le devoir de mémoire (the duty to remember) but le droit à l’histoire (the right to history). How then to remember this radical critic of memory whose politics were so attuned to historicity and futurity? Perhaps we could paraphrase his 1948 remarks on Schoelcher and say that it would be vain to commemorate Césaire unless we are prepared to imitate his politics. And paraphrasing his observations about Lou- verture’s untimely death, we might say that Césaire’s most revolutionary political act was to have sacrificed his status (as anticolonial icon) for our future. 90. Maximin is here invoking “Parole due,” one of Césaire’s last published poems (1993). I fol- low Annette Smith’s idiosyncratic translation of “parole due” as “speak now,” though, as Laurent Dubois has pointed out to me, it could also mean “words owed.” See Annette Smith, “ ‘A Man Was Here’: Aimé Césaire Revisited,” Research in African Literatures 37 (2006): 125, 128, 134. 91. Glissant writes that “it may be useful to point out that Toussaint’s relations with his deceased companions arise from a tradition, perhaps particular to the Antilles, of casual communication with the dead” (Monsieur Toussaint, 16).