The Great Camouflage: Writings of Dissent (1941-1945)
104
The Great Camouflage: Writings of Dissent (1941-1945)
104Paperback(Trans. from the French)
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780819572752 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Wesleyan University Press |
| Publication date: | 05/18/2012 |
| Edition description: | Trans. from the French |
| Pages: | 104 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.40(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.40(d) |
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The Great Camouflage
Writings of Dissent (1941â"1945)
By Suzanne Césaire, Daniel Maximin, Keith L. Walker
Wesleyan University Press
Copyright © 2009 Éditions du SeuilAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8195-7275-2
CHAPTER 1
Leo Frobenius and the Problem of Civilizations
A fundamental problem is that of civilization. We live it. We celebrate its progress or deplore its decadence. However, what is it in its essence?
Of course at first there are the traditional responses: the humanist response: the work of mankind, done by mankind for mankind; the agnostic response: "a giant organism and we can no more perceive its limits and grandeur than the microbes enclosed in our cells, were they endowed with thought, could perceive the structure and organization of our body."
Those are traditional responses, and then here is a man who knows: historian, archaeologist, ethnologist; indeed one could say: a poet. What is his response? The most extraordinary response possible, the most revolutionary, the weightiest in inferences: No, humankind does not create civilization, no, civilization is not the work of humankind. Quite the contrary, humankind is the instrument of civilization, a simple means of expression of a power which infinitely surpasses his understanding. Man does not act, he is activated, moved by a superior force which pre-dates humanity, a force to be likened to the life force itself, the foundational Paideuma.
And is this Paideuma, creator of civilizations, inaccessible to humankind's understanding? No — humankind truly conscious of its eminent dignity is capable of grasping it, not directly, but its secret is as impenetrable as the secret of the life force itself, but indirectly, in its diverse manifestations throughout humanity. Superior presence, perceptible only to those capable of "seeing in depth."
Let us listen to Frobenius himself: "The Paideuma reveals its specific laws everywhere. Cultures live and die, they are reborn and displace themselves according to particular laws as if humankind were not there, humankind who is only an instrument the Paideuma force makes use of to reveal itself."
The study of the manifestations of the Paideuma life force constitutes a new science that Frobenius calls the Morphology of Cultures. The Morphology of Cultures is neither primitive history, pre-history, nor modern history. It does not accumulate facts or dates. It is not to be confused with archaeology, nor is it ethnology, or ethnography — No. What it seeks is to study "the organic being" of civilization. Civilization itself conceived of as "a metaphysical entity." What it seeks is to grasp beyond the known limits of civilizations, this secret and formidable force that Frobenius names the Paideuma.
A grandiose conceptualization that embraces human evolution in its entirety; an admirable particularity that wants human beings to learn from the study of all other human beings from all other times. Science that is no longer just enlightened order, clever mastery of facts, but the search for intimate knowledge, of a secret reality revealed in the life-force itself.
This enormous effort interests us doubly, because it throws light upon the human problem, and because Leo Frobenius, in order to realize it, devoted himself to the study of African civilizations, and created for himself, as he asserts, an African soul, ways of thinking and feeling that are specifically African.
This study in greater depth of African civilizations, from numerous voyages of exploration, detailed observations of prehistoric rock pictures throughout the African continent and Europe, from comparative observations of religions, morals, customs, habitat, tools, commonly used utensils among most of the Earth's people, here is the abundant material that buttresses the elaboration of a method and a science that marries cold scientific precision with the beautiful daring inventions of the mind.
Leo Frobenius's analytical method moves in two directions:
1. Study of "forms" and of "places": study of the exterior aspects of civilizations, of their distribution in space. One can thus draw up maps — maps of dwellings on stilts, for example, during a particular period — one can set up diagrams, arrive at statistics.
2. Study of "substances": this is what belongs exclusively to Frobenius He says further: "study of the meaning of life" — he says more precisely: "a civilization, in the sense that we are giving this word, is not only the outward appearance of a people, but also the substance of an exterior and internal community in which all its members participate.
The first consequence of this method is the observation that the Paideuma, due to a phenomenon found in all manifestations of the vital force — the phenomenon of bipolarity — manifests itself literally in two opposite forms: (1) Ethiopian civilization and (2) Hamitic civilization. Ethiopian civilization is tied to the plant, to the vegetative cycle.
It is dreamy, drawn inward upon itself, mystical. The Ethiopian does not seek to understand phenomena — to grasp and dominate facts outside of himself. He lives and lets live, in a life identical to that of the plant, confident in the continuity of life: germinate, grow, flower, bear fruit, and the cycle starts all over again. The lived fact of poetry, felt so profoundly that the Ethiopian is almost never capable of projecting, of expressing outwardly. Also, for the Ethiopian, the notion of the father, of paternal relations, is fundamental. To sum up: "The Ethiopian feeling of life defines itself as a sense of the real and as primitive mysticism." The Hamitic civilization, on the contrary, is tied to the animal, to the conquest of the right to live through violent struggle and conquest. The Hamitic is active, conscious of external occurrences to which he opposes himself and that he must vanquish in order to survive. He never abandons himself freely to things but strives to dominate them by force or by magical practices. He does not have the sense of the continuity of generations, but of individual life. The mother is not required to be faithful to her husband if he is vanquished in battle. She becomes the wife of the victor. Briefly, "the Hamitic civilization is characterized by the significance of the event and primitive magic."
These two fundamental expressions of the Paideuma can no longer be found except buried deep in the consciousness of the peoples of the so-called higher civilizations of Europe, Asia, and America. On the contrary, in Africa, these forms of civilization can be studied in an almost pure state among so-called primitive populations. There are some among them who survive in their original, spectacular simplicity, human-plant, human-animal.
It suffices to interpret, for example, the strange rites of the forest populations where harvesting becomes a religious act, or still further to recover the original meaning of the cruelties of adolescent initiation rites among most Hamites. The geographic position and the massive form of the African continent have allowed the preservation of, in so to speak complete isolation, the forms of civilizations spontaneously sprung up from the soil; it is here that the alteration, or rather the inevitable evolution, was accomplished more slowly than elsewhere or, one should say, more "in depth," giving rise moreover in certain parts of the African territory to civilizations as brilliant as the Gao Empire at a time when Europe was covered with impenetrable forests and swamps.
From his first voyage to Africa in 1904, Leo Frobenius admired this remnant of a very ancient greatness. He admired "the gestures, the mannerisms, the customs ... with a meticulous attention to detail, a dignity, and a grace all natural." And he says: "I know no other people of the North who can compare themselves to the primitive peoples in terms of coherence of civilization."
Frobenius's History of African Civilization is a vast effort of synthesis toward the understanding of all these very ancient forms of civilization that today appear primitive and frozen in time, whereas in reality, they are very often symbols of an astonishing richness and complexity of spectacular cultures of which we know nothing.
Moreover, to the one who poses the harrowing question of human evolution, the gift of Africa appears invaluable: "Africa does not mean for us solely an expansion toward the elsewhere, but also a deepening of our knowledge of ourselves."
* * *
It is thus for Leo Frobenius and his disciples that the comparative study of civilizations is not only the clarification of what it means to be human, but also a glimpse of the future, thanks to the results of the new science. They believe themselves authorized to offer solutions to questions as compelling as these: "the role of the human" and the "drama of the Earth" ...
In effect Frobenius discovered that the idea of uninterrupted progress, cherished by the nineteenth century, which showed civilization progressing along a single line from primitive barbarism to modern high culture, was a false idea. Humanity does not have a will to achieve perfection. Moreover, it does not create for itself a civilization that aspires to ever-higher levels. It goes forth, on the contrary, motivated by the internal Paideuma, in multiple directions, from one "shock" to the next, just as the vital force goes from mutation to mutation among the diversity of living species. But before specifying this new notion of "shock," it is indispensable that we reveal how the vital force is itself expressed in the Paideuma, creator of civilizations. First of all, the fundamental polarity, sign of life itself, and which we have seen manifested already in the grand Ethiopian–Hamitic opposition: we find it in the details of the life of cultures.
For example, the stars (the moon, Sun, Venus, etc.) find themselves attributed a sex. And the determination of this sexual identity is not arbitrary. It responds to a precise spatial order. The paired stars, twins, brother, sister, lovers reign over particular regions, spread out, according to rules established by card games. Similarly, numbers participate in determining masculine and feminine nature. Thus, the number 4 is tied to space, to movement, to the masculine; the number 3 is tied to time, past, present, future; to the phases of the moon with its birth, its waxing and waning; into repose, into the feminine.
A conjunction charged with meaning, the symbolism of numbers is the reflection itself of the symbolism of the stars, the one and the other the profound expression of the space, time, primitive polarity of the reality of life. Now let us study the psychological process of the "shocks," how the numbers, the stars, the seasons have delivered to humans what Leo Frobenius calls their "essence." How the numbers, the stars, the seasons have determined in plant-man, animal-man a "revolution of the mind," a veritable alteration of his nature that is the distinguishing feature of the "shock."
The phases of the moon, the transit of the sun, the change of the seasons have not been the object of methodical observations on the part of the human who has not sought to draw lessons from these phenomena.
No. Abruptly, man was "shocked" by the essence of these phenomena, by their intimate, secret reality. He was turned upside down by a sudden emotion, urgent and irresistible. Thus the appearance and disappearance of the moon gave rise to the seizure of the concepts of time and death. It is this sudden awareness that is expressed for example in a great number of civilizations by all the rituals tied to the theme of the predetermination of the death of a god. Similarly sunlight illuminating the world gives rise to the grasp of space, of spatial limitation, of delimited order.
When the change of seasons unleashed the sudden awareness of the periodic rhythms of the life and death of nature, a new "sentiment of life" was born. Man became conscious of his individual existence and the problem of his destiny. One can say that at that moment the consciousness of man himself as an isolated reality in the external world was born.
We must not believe that these "seizures, shocks" have been successive stages: plant, animal, star, season have created and changed the nature of the sentiment of life in different places, in different epochs, have truly created and changed civilizations that over here go forth making themselves more profound, over there altering themselves, elsewhere intermingling further, bound the ones to the others in a more and ever greater complexity.
And as well there is how Leo Frobenius arrives at his vision of the future, for he is authorized to now write: "The history of human civilization is the history of the transformations of the sentiment of life." He can now search to see whether in our time a new sentiment is not manifesting itself, if our sad time is not perhaps the explosion of a new meaning, a new awareness, a new sentiment of life.
It seems that Euro-American man in the nineteenth century has been seized with a veritable madness for science, technology, machines, the result of which has been the creative imperialist thought of the world economy and its encircling of the globe. This veritable madness for power and domination, which turned humanity upside down during catastrophes as horrible as the wars of 1914 and 1939, is the symptom of a new surge of the Paideuma. These are surges we cannot fully comprehend, the real meaning of which still remains hidden. Therein lies the drama of the earth. As for the role of humankind, it is to prepare itself for living this other future, it is to allow itself to be moved by the Real, without losing this sense of sacredness, this sense of conquest, this sense of destiny that is its inestimable and unique heritage.
* * *
There you have the great message of Leo Frobenius to humankind today. His philosophy goes beyond the schoolish reasoning of his predecessors and of his contemporaries. He gave life and power to sociology. He rediscovers the meaning of cosmogonies and myths lost since the time of Anaxagore and Plato.
And this Philosophy is Poetry, the world recreated, humankind master of a new fate, strengthened by a new experience of life. The fruitfulness of this admirable doctrine is that it poses to each of us the immediate problems from which it is impossible to shy away without cowardice. It is now vital to dare to know oneself, to dare to confess to oneself what one is, to dare to ask oneself what one wants to be. Here, also, people are born, live, and die. Here also, the entire drama is played out.
"It is time to gird one's loins like a valiant man."
SUZANNE CÉSAIRE
Tropiques no. 1, 1941
Alain and Esthetics
A peculiar fate is that of Emile-Auguste Chartier, known as Alain.
Political scientist, economist, moralist ...
His politics read as defeat, his "economics" read as crisis, and in the face of events that monstrously disrupt the world at this time, his doctrine — pills of optimism — can seem to us a parody.
So what?
Well, it will remain nonetheless that this "professor," this philosopher by profession, will have forcefully laid out the problem of art; will have understood the importance of the extraordinary phenomenon that constitutes poetic creation, and will have consigned it to its proper place: first place! First place in a ruinously extravagant world of bankruptcy, and fraud; first place in a world in which the most dismal of games is being played: the hide-and-seek of humankind and with itself.
It is a mind of exceptional logic and clarity. Alain thinks above all about a system of the fine arts.
And foremost there is a methodical analysis of the arts.
What is drawing, painting, architecture, sculpture?
What is music? Poetry?
The history of art, from drawing to poetry, is for Alain the history of a conquest: the conquest of the human over a set of resistant, stubborn yet manageable forces that we call nature.
And here we are, at the threshold of art, the human alone, almost detached from the obstacle. And it is in drawing that we find artistic expression in a face-to-face conversation with itself.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Great Camouflage by Suzanne Césaire, Daniel Maximin, Keith L. Walker. Copyright © 2009 Éditions du Seuil. Excerpted by permission of Wesleyan University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Translator's Introduction: Suzanne Césaire and the Great Camouflages – Keith L. Walker Translator's NoteEditor's Introduction: Suzanne Césaire, sun-filled fountain – Daniel MaximinLeo Frobenius and the Problem of CivilizationsAlain and EstheticsAndré Breton, PoetPoetic DestitutionThe Malaise of a Civilization1943: Surrealism and UsThe Great Camouflage"The Creole Dialogue," – Daniel Maximin"Antille," – André MassonThe Creole Dialogue between André Breton and André Masson"Let Poetry Go," – René MénilAimé-Suzy, – Daniel Maximin"Hair," – Aimé Césaire"Seismic Shift," – Aimé Césaire"Son of Thunder and Lightning," – Aimé Césaire"Suzanne Césaire, My Mother," – Ina CésaireContributorsWhat People are Saying About This
"This is the first work to translate Cesaire's essays in their entirety and to collect them in a single volume. As such, it is a welcome addition to the study of early 20th century Francophone Caribbean women's writing. The translation is both eloquent and accurate, which is quite an accomplishment given the complexity of Cesaire's writing."
— Jennifer Wilks, author of Race, Gender, and Comparative Black Modernism
"This is the first work to translate Césaire's essays in their entirety and to collect them in a single volume. As such, it is a welcome addition to the study of early 20th century Francophone Caribbean women's writing. The translation is both eloquent and accurate, which is quite an accomplishment given the complexity of Césaire's writing."—Jennifer Wilks, author of Race, Gender, and Comparative Black Modernism
"Keith Walker's translation of The Great Camouflage corrects the view that the Césaire legacy moves in a unilateral direction. A thinker in her own right, Suzanne Césaire was a key figure in that glittering constellation of theoreticians who gave form and shape to the idea of "negritude." This volume of essays is a genuine treasure."—Hortense Spillers, Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English, Vanderbilt University
“Keith Walker’s translation of The Great Camouflage corrects the view that the Césaire legacy moves in a unilateral direction. A thinker in her own right, Suzanne Césaire was a key figure in that glittering constellation of theoreticians who gave form and shape to the idea of “negritude.” This volume of essays is a genuine treasure.”