Mad and black : the 1939 Notebook of the Évolué

In A. James Arnold and Malachi Mcintosh's recent readings of Aimé Césaire's Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (1939), the speaker “I” is presumed to be the author. Moving away from this kind of reading, I offer a different approach. I analyze the poem in psychoanalytic and rhetorical terms in order to delineate a poetics of “black madness.” Drawing on Suzanne Césaire, Aimé Césaire, and Frantz Fanon's psychoanalytic observations, I argue that the speaker of Cahier, an évolué, is “mad.” He is a black man who believes he is white and is doubly alienated by this delusion. He is separated from his own Martinican people and from Western society which seeks to objectify him. The poetics of Cahier presents a possible “way out” for the speaker's marginality and “madness.” It is in the poem's pathos, irony, metaphor, and allegory that the “madness” of being black is brought out of the “unconscious.”