Someone once told me that Aimé Césaire’s Return to My Native Land (Cahier d’un retour au pays natal in its original French) only saw the light of day when a casual passer-by discovered the tattered leaves of an original manuscript under a pile of books in a second-hand shop, or, alternatively, among a bunch of news and other papers destined to wrap up someone’s takeaway dinner in a fish and chip shop in a southern French port city sometime in the 1950s. The passer-by, it was said, paged through the leaves and uncovered a thin seam of gold, which he then rushed to the publishers — and the rest is history.
It seems that this is mere urban legend. But urban legend never did any great piece of work any harm on its way to achieving celebrity.
Apparently this was nothing like the truth. Césaire had written his novella-length poetic masterpiece as a deliberate commentary on his thoughts about being forced to leave France — where he had been a student from the colonial territory of Martinique — and return to a long-distant native land. He had mixed feelings about both leaving and arriving, and had a mouthful to say about the racist European society he was leaving and some loving and agonising thoughts about the tiny Caribbean island he was returning to.
France had given him much, but also kicked him frequently in his educated teeth. It was an ancient centre of world culture and learning, part of the modern world where he stood, right on the edge of the looming World War II. But black people like Césaire were often no more than a despised and necessary evil. They were the enslaved, the colonised, the degraded.
Martinique, on the other hand, just like the rest of the colonised world that people like him were escaping from, threatened to receive him with its rotting sugar cane stench of poverty, disease and malnutrition — both of the body and of the mind.
He decided to write about his mixed feelings on the eve of his departure — and emerged with a modern masterpiece, which has since become a classic.
As I said, the fish and chips version of how this masterpiece saw the light of day is not quite true. It was published in France not long after he had completed it, but received a pretty cold and critical response. It died on its feet as Césaire prepared to board ship and sail back to the inevitable across the Atlantic.
But Césaire himself was soon to return to France and embark on a notable intellectual and political career. With his return came a chance to republish the work. This time, its value was noted with enthusiasm, particularly among the black intellectuals and their radical French colleagues, and became a seminal treatise on slave and colonial history, and the rising tide of what came to be called “negritude”. Negritude, in fact, became a cornerstone of many strands of black liberation “theology” — a precursor, say, to Steve Biko’s “Black Consciousness”, which it strongly influenced. The rest is history.
Return to My Native Land is a soaring exploration of that relationship between what we used to refer to easily as the “oppressor” and the “oppressed”. It not only tells the story of that relationship in graphic historical detail, the language Césaire chooses to use also becomes an exploration of this symbiotic, love/hate relationship. In its time, as in the present, it is beyond comparison for the boldness of its assault on these themes.
The themes are not just intellectual. They hit you in the groin with deliberate, sensuous precision, and therefore lodge in your heart and your brain forever. It is a pure example of Shakespeare’s enslaved, Caribbean Caliban’s anguished cry: “You taught me language, and my profit on it is, I [now] know how to curse!”
Césaire’s work was written to be read — perhaps read aloud, but read, nevertheless. It is an intellectual piece.
Jacques Martial, the Paris-based Guadeloupian actor and director, has done what many thespians have long dreamed of doing something — turning Native Land into a tour de force of solo acting — few believed could be possible. And yet, to the privileged few who made it to see his performance of the work on a short tour to Lesotho and a few South African cities, he made the entire text of Césaire’s work come to life on an almost naked stage. (And, to please us, he did it all in English. He has been performing it in French, in France, for some time to great acclaim and wanted it to reach a greater audience.)
The combined power and humility of the man on stage is a revelation to a country starved of truly challenging debate on social and political issues unfolding in the theatre. And yet this is what theatre, in these confusing times, should be all about. In the wake of the world-shaking township theatre movement, we see precious little that really confronts what we are about, and where we are coming from. We have not yet discovered a theatrical voice that can describe the postcolonial, post-apartheid era with such unwavering articulacy.
It takes a work that dates back nearly 70 years to tell it like it was, and like it still is. And it takes an actor-director of astonishing bravery and charisma to make us look at ourselves, the residents and returnees of our own native land, and reflect on where we should be going.
It’s a shame this performance could not have become compulsory viewing and listening for yet another new generation confronted with the unlaid ghosts of the past.