Epilogue

Summary

quasi cursores vitai lampada tradunt

(like runners they pass on the torch of life)

Lucretius

Two momentous events in the biography of Aimé Césaire – one literary, the other political – have converged to give the impression of a sense of closure to his dual career. The first was his abdication, so to speak, from electoral politics in Martinique in 1993; the second, the publication of his complete poetry in Paris in the following year. This sequence of events, whether coincidental or not, affords us a convenient vantage point from which to sketch an overview of his reception both locally and internationally.

To begin with the artistic horizon of reception: it is undeniable that, despite the apparent marginality of much postcolonial writing, Césaire's creative corpus places him securely within the central purview of the European poetic canon. Though (or more accurately, precisely because) his work is permeated by an indictment of Western imperialism and colonialism, its formal attributes no less than its subject-matter situate its author in an omnipresent dialogue with past representatives of that canon, such as Aeschylus, Shakespeare, Rousseau and Mallarmé. As we have tried to show in some detail in the preceding chapters, to interpret Césaire's writing is to engage in an intertextual discourse that ranges from Greco-Roman to contemporary literatures. An inescapable consequence of this intertextual awareness is that his poetry is far more accessible to the sophisticated metropolitan French reader that it is to the local Caribbean audience. The exception that proves the rule may be the theatrical works; for the dramatic “triptych” on the black world comes closer than any of the author's other poetic compositions to being communicable to a less educated, popular audience.