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This week, Phyllis Forbes discusses Amie Cesaire's "Discourse on Colonialism".






Poetry is Revolutionary



At our last weekly internship meeting, I was reminded of how some students—of all disciplines, even English—are afraid of poetry. Perhaps it is the poetic syntax and "elevated language" which frightens; perhaps it s the notion that there exists a "correct" interpretation which daunts. Either way, I'd like to invite those previously put off by poetics to re-envision the medium as a powerful means of bringing understanding to people, regardless of their education or social class. In fact, I hereby officially reclaim poetics as the textbook of the people; I render a poetic understanding of the world on par with a scientific one. I cast aside the western notion of the superiority of western notions.

Though I'd like to be able to take credit for this reclamation, I have to give credit where credit is due. It was Amie Cesaire (1913-2008) who said "poetics are born in the vast silence of scientific knowledge." Cesaire was a poet and former president of Martinique, whose prescient prose provided a foundation for modern post colonial theory. His book "Discourse on Colonialism" seeks to provide an explanation of the mechanism and effects of colonialism on both the colonized and the colonizer, and to advocate for a new understanding of the world informed by surrealism and non Eurocentric thinking.

Specifically, Cesaire outlines how the stratification between Paganism and Christianity, between white and all other skin colors was constructed solely as a business strategy when mercantilism was the Western world's economic policy. The simple idea that free labor yields a very high profit margin is the simple idea on which colonization was founded. In order to facilitate such an unfair exchange, the colonial apparatus created the rationalization they needed by propagating white skin and a western value system as superior to all other ways of looking or doing things. By misprizing all other philosophies; by condemning nonwestern religious practices; by falsely linking barbarism and dark skin; colonial powers legitimized the subjugation and decimation of millions of lives in the name of business. In the end it is the colonizer who becomes the barbarian as he kills and enslaves in the name of civility.

I'd like to share a poem by Cesaire, as I feel that sometimes his non-prose poetry is overlooked by many. The imagery of a vast, empty, post apocalyptic world was perhaps the poet's vision of a future that holds as true the lies of the past.


Blank to Fill in on the Visa of Pollen

If there were nothing in the desert but

A single drop of water dreaming far below,

In the desert if there were nothing but

A windborne spore dreaming far above,

It would suffice.

Rusting of weapons, splitting of stones, anarchy of darkness

Desert, desert, I endure your challenge

Blank to fill in on the visa of pollen