The image on page 5 is France and the Catholic Church united together in destroying this island. The stanza begins with the corruption and sodomies of the host and sacrificing priest, following by a list of offenses. The offenses flow right into degenerative vocabulary describing La Martinique, “scrofulous buboes”, “forced feeding of very strange microbes”, “sanies of ancient sores”, and “unforeseeable fermentations of putrescible species”. It’s an image of rotting away, death, a slow degenerative death. The night is motionless, the stars dead, the balafon caved in, the music stopped. He denounces efforts to associate themselves with France. “And our foolish and crazy stunts to revive the golden splashing of privileged moments, the umbilical cord restored to its ephemeral splendor…”. This has gotten them nowhere. The results of the host and sacrificing priest’s “prejudice and stupidity, the prostitutions, the hypocrisies, the lubricities, the treasons, the lies…” are that they are poverty stricken, sick and dying, scenes played out for us throughout the text. It’s time for a different method, time to reject and separate themselves from the host and sacrificing priest. My favorite line on the poem is “put up with me, I won’t put up with you”. (p.23)
In the first sentence, he tells the cop to beat it, a cop being an image for imperialism. After reminding them of the degradation by the masters, imperialists Europeans, whites, Césaire exalts his race, the nobility of working the earth, work without greed or desire for control. He wants them recognize their uniqueness, to celebrate their blackness, their ancestors and roots, their island, their colonialism.
This poem was so difficult for me that I did not really enjoy it, but at the same time I was captivated by the power and beauty of its language.
