In her 1942 essay from the Martinican Surrealist journal, Tropiques, poet Suzanne Césaire describes the Caribbean as follows : "Il y a plaquées contre les îles les belles larmes vertes de l’eau et du silence. Il y a la pureté du sel autour des Caraibes. Il y a sous mes yeux la jolie place de Pétionville, plantée de pins et d’hibiscus. Il y a mon île, la Martinique et son frais collier de nuages soufflés par la Pelée." ("There are, placed in between the beautiful islands, green tears of water and silence. The purity of salt surrounds the Caribbean. There is, I can see, the square of Pétionville, planted with pines and hibuscus. There is my island, Martinique, and it’s fresh necklace of clouds blown by Mt. Pelée.")
From a stylistic point of view, her use of natural imagery mirrors that of French Surrealist author André Breton. Breton’s Surrealist writings and political activism supported Suzanne and (husband) Aimé Césaire’s project of locating various definitions of the Martinican subject (and later the colonized subject in general) that supported the pan-African, pan-Caribbean, and pan-American movement of Negritude. When these three prolific writers and Cuban-born artist Wifredo Lam met in Martinique in April 1941, their productive two-week visit fueled an intense literary and artistic exchange that lasted over ten years.
There were many stylistic connections born out of this exchange, especially between the poetry and essays of the Césaires and the painting of Wifredo Lam. When examining these works, one cannot ignore the influence of the French Surrealists, namely Breton and Aragon, whose texts provided a stylistic source from which the Césaires and other Caribbean writers drew.
The most obvious connection is Lam’s collaboration with Aimé Césaire, including his illustration of the 1947 edition of A. Césaires’ Cahier d’un retour au pays natal published by Bordas. The cover, painted by Lam, depicts a human figure with arms raised in the shape of a totem and a simple African mask instead of a face. Four years earlier, Lam used one of Césaire’s poems as an inspiration for his painting, "La Jungla." The large tableau features animalistic, hybrid characters (dinosaur -monsters and bird-women with sagging breasts, horse manes and interconnected shoes and feet), images Lam claimed resulted from a close reading Césaire’s text.
I view the use of Surrealism in this context as the result of an organic, natural process coming out of the artists’ respective cultural backgrounds. Any connection to European Surrealism only serves to reinforce the solidarity between the French and Spanish Surrealists and artists from the former colonies. Viewing artistic practice as a way in which to establish a solidarity among former “colonizer” and formerly “colonized,” instead of a means of cultural domination, dissolves the rigid binary and opens up discussions of how transnational artistic exchange can be a powerful method of inspiring political action, policy revision, and identity formation.
Paris: Jean Michel Place, 1978.
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