Cahier d'un retour au pays natal

Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (first published in 1939, with two revised editions in 1947 and a final edition in 1956), variously translated as Notebook of a Return to My Native Land, Return to My Native Land, or Journal of a Homecoming, is a book-length poem by Martinican writer Aimé Césaire, considered his masterwork, that mixes poetry and prose to express his thoughts on the cultural identity of black Africans in a colonial setting.

History

After a rejection by a French publisher, Césaire submitted the manuscript of the poem to Georges Pelorson, director of the Parisian periodical Volontés, who published it in August 1939, just as Césaire was returning to Martinique to take up a post as a teacher.^[1][2] Césaire continued to revise the poem and published two expanded versions with more surrealist elements in 1947, first through Brentano's in New York and later Éditions Bordas in Paris, with an introductory essay by André Breton that had first appeared in 1943 in the New York-based review Hémisphêres under the title "Un grand poete noir".^[1][3] In his introduction Breton called the poem "nothing less than the greatest lyrical monument of our times."^[4] A "definitive edition" was published in 1956 by Présence Africaine.^[5] In this final edition, which has further additions and revisions, Césaire also deleted some material from the 1939 and 1947 editions, "leading the reader away from the spiritual sacrifice of the speaker and toward a sense of collective socialist action", as Arnold and Eshleman put it.^[6] Alex Gil argues for a holistic reading of the entire textual history of the poem through its religious, surrealist and Marxian phases, not just the final edition, noting that "the poem's central theme and approach remain unchanged" throughout the four editions.^[3]

According to Bonnie Thomas, Cahier d'un retour au pays natal was a turning point in French Caribbean literature: "Césaire’s groundbreaking poem laid the foundations for a new literary style in which Caribbean writers came to reject the alienating gaze of the Other in favour of their own Caribbean interpretation of reality."^[7]

Adaptations and tributes

The poem was adapted as a one-man show by Cy Grant.^[8]

A passage from the poem provided the title for a volume of Selected Writings by C. L. R. James, At the Rendezvous of Victory (Allison and Busby, 1984),^[9] as well as an epigraph for that volume, much quoted by other writers, such as Edward Said.^[10]

For it is not true that the work of man is finished,
That we have nothing more to do in the world,
That we are just parasites in this world,
That it is enough for us to walk in step with the world,
For the work of man is only just beginning and it remains to conquer all,
The violence entrenched in the recess of his passion,
And no race holds a monopoly of beauty, of intelligence, of strength, and
There is a place for all at the rendezvous of victory.

English translations

• Memorandum on My Martinique, trans. Ivan Goll and Lionel Abel (Brentano's, 1947). Bilingual edition.
• Return to My Native Land, trans. Emile Snyder (Présence Africaine, 1968). Bilingual edition.
• Return to My Native Land, trans. John Berger and Anna Bostock, with an introduction by Mazisi Kunene (Penguin Books, 1969; illustrated by Peter de Francia, Archipelago Books, 2014, ISBN 9781935744948).
• Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, trans. Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith (1983; Wesleyan University Press, 2001)
• Notebook of a Return to My Native Land / Cahier d'un retour au pays natal, trans. Mireille Rosello with Annie Pritchard (Bloodaxe Contemporary French Poets: 4, 1995, ISBN 9781852241841). Bilingual edition.^[11]
• The Original 1939 Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, trans. A. James Arnold and Clayton Eshleman (Wesleyan University Press, 2013). Bilingual edition.
• Journal of a Homecoming / Cahier d′un retour au pays natal, trans. N. Gregson Davis (Duke University Press, 2017; ISBN 978-0-8223-6896-0). Bilingual edition with introduction, commentary and notes by F. Abiola Irele (from his 2000 Ohio State University edition).^[12]