the silence of shadows

Cesaire also embraced the struggle of Black Americans in "On the State of the Union," a highly sardonic poem on the murder of Emmet Till, a Black boy who allegedly eyed a white woman. The white Americans are described as bloodless, their hearts made of "tough antiseptic meat."

But Cesaire never resolved the problem of poetry's relation to revolution, a problem which South African poets now face. Yet he succeeded in becoming a bridge between the seemingly irreconcilable worlds of Europe and Africa. Instead of rejecting the African culture, he held it up as a vision in which all mankind would recognize itself. And like the Black American Alice Walker, Cesaire realized that only by using the particular can a writer reach the universal.

Perhaps Cesaire was too optimistic in believing the world would accept Africa on equal terms. Even his own Martinique is merely an overseas department of France and its dual identity has not died. The most recent poems included in Collected Poems are hardly as fiery as his earlier works, revealing his doubts about the new African states and about his own ideals. But the mingling of pleasure and violence and the searing images remain. His themes of mythology and negritude still haunt his poems, as in the brutal yet hopeful "Ferments":

Seducing your bird-like reticence

with

the feast of my liver oh Sun, torn

open, lurching.

The bitter struggle taught us our

cunning,

biting the clay, kneading the dust

marking the sweating earth

with blazons of our backs, with the

bloody

trees of our shoulders, bloody

eagle disentangled jolt of dawn.

The political climate has changed since the poem's first publication in 1960 and so has the optimism that accompanied it. Yet Cesaire's poetry of negritude, in its tension between form and content, transcends the particular and is thus an essential chapter in Black history and literature.