ABSTRACT
This chapter looks to Aime Cesaire's earlier work, which is to say up to 1944, including his best-known poem, the Cahier d'un retour au pays natal. It places Cesaire almost entirely in terms of European traditions and interlocutors and therefore runs the risk of turning him into simply an exemplary European or, worse, Frenchman. The chapter argues that Cesaire is an important and usefully uncomfortable test case for Timothy Brennan's approach. Cesaire in his poetry set out to re- or differently politicize the socio-anthropological heritage of Martinique and by doing so to make race mean something other than what it did. Cesaire's investment in Mallarme, in the Surrealists, in the hermeticism of poetry as a tool to explode, or at least reshape, the French language goes hand in hand with his insistence that it is only from within this language, within the sphere of francophonie, that concrete freedom is really available for the Antillean.
