74 Picasso. Illustration to Aimé Césaire’s Corps perdu. 1950
Cesaire is an extremely sophisticated poet. His use of the French language can be compared with Rimbaud’s. But the theme of his poetry is urgent and politicaclass="underline" the theme of the struggle of all Negro peoples everywhere for equal rights — economically, politically, and culturally. He has been a Deputy in the National Assembly in Paris, and the mayor of Fort-de-France, capital of Martinique.
In his poems he uses magic as a metaphor. He metaphorically turns himself into a magician so that he may speak for and to the Negro world at the deepest level of its experience and memories. But because he is not alone, there is no nostalgia in this ‘regression’, and certainly no idealization of the ‘noble savage’. He claims humanity for his own people and accuses of savagery — without any nobility at all — those who exploit and repress them.
A true Copernican revolution must be imposed here [Africa], so much is rooted in Europe, and in all parties, in all spheres, from the extreme right to the extreme left, the habit of doing for us, the habit of thinking for us, in short the habit of contesting that right to initiative which is in essence the right to personality.
For Césaire there is no essential contrast (and for this reason no possibility of idealization) between the primitive and the highly developed. What lies between them is prevention and greed. Otherwise the progression from the simple to the complex would be as natural as in these lines:
The wheel is the most beautiful discovery of man and the only one
there is the sun which turns
there is the earth which turns
there is your face which turns upon the axle of your throat when you cry.…
Or, expressed more directly:
They demand of us: ‘Choose … choose between loyalty and with it backwardness, or progress and rupture.’ Our reply is that things are not so simple, that there isn’t an alternative. That life (I say life and not abstract thought) does not know and does not accept this alternative. Or rather that if this alternative presents itself, it is life that will take care of its transcendence.
Like Picasso, Césaire reaches across history. Like Picasso he would have confounded everybody before the twentieth century, because it would have seemed impossible then for a man to be in two ‘times’ at once: in the heart of Africa and at the centre of European literature. But, unlike Picasso’s, Césaire’s ‘reach’ is being constantly confirmed by events. He is part of a force that is changing the world before our eyes; whereas Picasso has become a law unto himself.
Here in the Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, Césaire imagines how it will be when he returns home:
I would find once more the secret of great speech and of great burning. I would say storm. I would say river. I would say tornado. I would say leaf, I would say tree. I would be soaked by each rain, moistened by every dew. As frenetic blood rolls upon the slow current of the eye, so I would roll words like maddened horses like new children like!clotted milk like curfew like traces of a temple like precious stones far enough away to daunt all miners. Who could not understand me would no more understand the roaring of the tiger.
Rise, phantoms, chemical-blue from a forest of hunted beasts of twisted machines of jujube-tree of rotten flesh of a basket of oysters of eyes of a lacework of lashes cut from the lovely sisal of a human skin I would have words huge enough to contain you all and you too stretched earth drunken earth
earth great sex raised at the sun
earth great delirium of God
earth risen wild from the sea’s locker with a bunch of cecrops in your mouth
earth whose surfing face I must compare to the mad and virgin forests that I would wish to wear as countenance before the undeciphering eyes of men.
one mouthful of your milk-spurt would let me discover always at the distance of a mirage an earth — a thousand times more native, golden with a sun no prism has sampled — a fraternal earth where all is free, my earth.
When Césaire arrives back in Martinique, he is disappointed. He finds an apathetic, demoralized, trivial colony:
Now I have come.
Once more this limping life before me, no not this life, this death, this death without sense or piety, this death where greatness pitifully fails, this death which limps from pettiness to pettiness; little greeds heaped on top of the conquistador; little flunkeys heaped on top of the great savage; little souls shovelled on top of the three-souled Caribbean.
Later he recovers from his disappointment, and pledges himself to his people, since it is only by such identification that the magic can be wrought, the magic of a ‘fraternal earth’.
And here at the end of the small hours is my virile prayer
that I may hear neither laughter nor crying, my eyes
upon this city which I prophesy as beautiful.
Give me the sorcerer’s savage faith
give my hands the power to mould
give my soul the temper of the sword,
I will stand firm. Make of my head a prow
and of myself make neither a father,
nor a brother, nor a son,
but the father, but the brother, but the son,
nor make of me a husband, but the lover of this unique people.
I quote Césaire at such length because today it is hard for most Western European intellectuals to imagine the devotion which an artist may feel for his ‘unique people’. This devotion is the result of mutual dependence. The people need a spokesman — the fact that Césaire is a French Deputy is almost as important as his being a poet; the artist needs the clamour and hopes of those whom he represents.
For Picasso there has been no such ‘unique people’. He has exiled himself from Spain. He has seldom left France, and in France he has lived like an emperor in his own private court. Such facts would not necessarily count if he could still have identified himself in imagination with a ‘unique people’. But the unique people have been reduced to a unique person, who only half exists by virtue of his contrast with everybody else: the noble savage.
We must now return to the consequences of Picasso’s isolation as they have affected his art. He has not lacked appreciation. Nor has he lacked creativity. What he has lacked are subjects.
When it comes to it, there are very few subjects. Everybody repeats them. Venus and Cupid becomes the Virgin and Child, then a Mother and Child, but it’s always the same subject. To invent a new subject must be wonderful. Take Van Gogh. His potatoes — such an everyday thing. To have painted that — or his old boots! That was really something.
In this statement — it was part of a conversation with his old dealer Kahnweiler in 1955 — Picasso unwittingly reveals his difficulty. No other statement tells us so much about the fundamental problem of his art. Only in the crudest sense is a Venus and Cupid the same subject as a Virgin and Child. One might as well say that all landscapes from the early Italians to Monet are the same subject. The meaning of a Venus and Cupid, the significance of all that has been selected to be included in the picture, is totally different from that of a Virgin and Child, even when the latter is secular and has lost its religious conviction. The two subjects depend on an utterly different agreement being imagined between painter and spectator.