Tropiques

By Paul-Louis Biondi, '24

Access a reprint of this journal via Princeton University Library.

To learn more about Surrealism in the Caribbean more widely, visit this StoryMaps project.

After Aimé and Suzanne Césaire’s time in Paris, they returned to Martinique in 1939 aboard the SS Bretagne. Upon their return, they took up teaching positions at the prestigious Lycée Schoelcher, named after the famous abolitionist, and in 1941 co-founded the journal Tropiques (Joseph-Gabriel, 2016). In addition to Aimé and Suzanne Césaire, René Ménil helped found the literary journal, as well as Lucie Thésée and Aristide Maugée, two figures who are often forgotten in the genesis story of the periodical. Among its contributors, Tropiques welcomed a number of French surrealist writers (André Breton, Pierre Mabille, René Étiemble, among others), as well as a number of Latin American and Caribbean writers (like Jorge Caceres and Lydia Cabrera). The journal even included a selection of poems by black American poets in its second issue. Tropiques thus introduced its audience to a wide number of international authors and transnational poetics, including the French surrealists and surrealism.

Tropiques. [selected pages]

With fourteen issues between 1941 and 1945, Tropiques did not necessarily have a singular ideology. Even while working with surrealist and négritude ideas, the journal saw them as tools towards the realization of a project of Martinican literary and cultural production (Diard, 2017). This is something which Katerina Gonzalez Seligmann emphasizes, writing that the group’s practice “suggests that its [Tropiques’] poetic productivity exceeds the scope of both terms” (Seligmann 2016, 495). Rather, the journal’s focus arose from its geographic, historical, and political contexts in addition to the concepts and ideas provided by Negritude and surrealism. Its force truly came from a poetry and poetics that explored, often discreetly, the problem of identity and freedom in a moment when these ideals were literally and figuratively inscribed within European, and especially French, frames. This being said, in André Breton’s eyes, Tropiques also provided the Caribbean with an introduction to surrealism and was crucial in expanding the reach of surrealism beyond France (Wilks 2008).

Suzanne Césaire, "1943: le surréalisme et nous," Tropiques, no. 5 (1943): 18

To this end, Suzanne Césaire herself was probably the foremost advocate for surrealism in the journal, writing two essays – “André Breton, poète” (1941) and “1943: le surréalisme et nous” (1943) – during the journal’s run. While her husband, Aimé Césaire, saw surrealism as a poetic tool, it may be fair to say that Suzanne envisioned it more as a “critical tool, a means of reflection that would provide… a critical foundation to explore [Martinique’s] cultural context” (Richardson 1996). During this time, Martinique found itself severely policed and isolated by the Vichy government. Under Admiral Georges Robert, the Vichy high commissioner to the Antilles, heavy censorship was enforced, universal male suffrage was revoked, black government officials were fired and replaced with administrators who could cater to French political and corporate interests, surveillance increased, and replicated Vichy nationalism throughout the empire (Joseph-Gabriel 2019). This nationalism, as Eric Jennings notes in Vichy in the Tropics, favored essentializing policies of racial exclusion and Western supremacy in its colonies, emphasizing the differences between France and its colonial subjects (2004).

"Sommaire," Tropiques, no. 3 (1941)

And it often mandated a focus in the colonies on “themes of authenticity, tradition, and folklore” (Jennings 2004, 21-23).As a result, the publication often found its contributors focusing on local and folkloric poetry or critical discussions of Western figures like Leo Frobenius, a German ethnographer who wrote about African civilization, in order to couch their own anti-colonial critiques and a literary and political resistance. In their focus on both the Caribbean and Africa, the contributors adopted a “self-repudiating language of critique” that satisfied the Vichy emphasis on racial difference and local authenticity, while also examining the cultural afflictions arising on the island from centuries of colonialism (Seligmann 2016, 498). In this context. Suzanne Césaire’s own leveraging of surrealism can then be seen as a means of articulating an anti-colonial and liberating discourse in Martinique.

Writing the conclusion to her “1943: le surréalisme et nous,” after Martinique’s liberation from the Vichy administration, Suzanne Césaire becomes more overt In her anti-colonialism and (famously) qualifies surrealism as the "tightrope of our hope" (1943).

Our surrealism will then supply them the leaven from their very depths. It will be time to finally transcend the sordid antinomies: Whites-Blacks, Europeans-Africans, civilized-savage… Colonial idiocies will be purified by the welding arc’s blue flame. The mettle of our mettle, our cutting edge of steel, our unique communions––all will be recovered... Surrealism, tightrope of our hope.

Suzanne Césaire, "1943: le surréalisme et nous," Tropiques, no. 8/9 (1943): 24.

The visual schema elucidated by this statement places surrealism as a literal and metaphorical bridge in the war-torn Francophone world. And the tightrope of surrealism is the same as the tightrope of liberation. Beneath it and between the two geographies (that of Martinique and that of the metropole) lies the chasm of occupation and Vichy curtailment. In a moment when Martinique found itself able to articulate hope once again, while France remained under Nazi occupation, Césaire’s surrealism moves from Martinique to France, rather than the other way around, and offers to the metropole a critical foundation developed further in Martinique during the war, inversing the typical operation of power and culture in the French colonial empire. Even as Vichy lost its foothold in Martinique, Suzanne Césaire maintained a gesture of discreet cultural resistance in the context of the Francophone world. Positioned thus within the realm of the Caribbean and seemingly ascribing to Western intellectual endeavors, Tropiques’ contributors found themselves more readily able to redirect resistance forms by engaging with Western movements invested in decolonial and resistance methods, like surrealism.

The practice of the reader then becomes one of reading between the lines and understanding the specific transformation of the human experience in Martinique. The opening lines of Aimé Césaire’s foreword to Tropiques no. 1 (1941), titled “Présentation,” attest to this.

Aimé Césaire, "Presentation," Tropiques, no. 1 (1941): 8

"Mute and sterile earth. It is ours of which I speak. And my hearing measures the frightening silence of man throughout the Caribbean. Europe. Africa. Asia. I hear the steel howls, the drums among the bush, and the temple praying amidst the banyan. And I know it is Man who speaks. Still and always, and I listen."

The island of Martinique from the onset of the journal seems to be dominated by silence and dearth. Contesting phantasms of the Caribbean as a place of beauty and leisure, the looming silence and sterility that dominates are those of man himself. And yet, there are many sounds that encompass the island – howls, drums, prayer. The three continents named are those from which Caribbean populations descend, and each sound is associated with one continent. Europe, the steel howls; Africa, the drums; Asia, the prayer and the temple. They are combined in this space of the Caribbean.

Man comes to speak through these sounds of the island, rather than on top of them. Seligmann rightly adds that the “steel howl” implies Western forms of domination and violence, including its Vichy iteration, but also suggests the sounds of war and catastrophe that have silenced man (2016, 499). I would also add that Césaire deploys a surrealist poetics and transforms the industrial object into a zoomorphic personage, attaching the project of Western civilization to an organic, animalistic vision of culture. The words “banyan” and “bush” carry their own critique. The bush quickly reveals itself in its association with the mornes, the dense mountainous landscape of inland Martinique. Historically, the mornes had been home to many maroons who had escaped from slavery and created their own free communities in geographically secluded parts of the island. Aimé Césaire’s invocation of the “tam-tam” and the “bush” reference these histories of resistance and dissidence, contesting the historical dominance of French colonialism. Moreover, Seligman asserts that the “banyan” acts as a symbol for the whole Caribbean since it is a plant that dominates the archipelago, thus pointing towards a cry for common action, a solidarity amongst all those, like the surrealists, invested in decolonial praxis (Seligmann 2016).

By these discrete movements and moments of resistance, contributors to the journal found themselves creating a lexicon for Caribbean identity and literary production. Tropiques, as both a literary journal and a form of resistance to colonial and cultural domination, engages with surrealism in its multiple forms as a way of exploring avenues for liberation and for the creation of an Antillean and Caribbean identity beyond the colonial spheres.

Bibliography

Bernal, María Clara. “A Voice for Surrealism: Suzanne Césaire and the Tropiques Group.” International Journal of Surrealism 1, no 1 (2023): 40-57.

Césaire, Aimé. “Présentation.” Tropiques, no. 1 (1941): 8-10.

Césaire, Suzanne. “1943: le surréalisme et nous” Tropiques, no. 8/9 (1943): 18-25.

Diard, Dominique. “Tropiques: dissidences et resonances.” Revue de littérature comparée 4, no. 364 (2017): 390-403.

Jennings, Eric Thomas. Vichy in the Tropics: Pétain’s National Revolution in Madagascar, Guadeloupe, and Indochina, 1940-1944. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004.

Joseph-Gabriel, Annette K. “Beyond the Great Camouflage: Haiti in Suzanne Césaire’s Politics and Poetics of Liberation.” Small Axe 50 (July 2016): 1-13.

––––––. Reimagining Liberation: How Black Women Transformed Citizenship in the French Empire. Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2019.

Richardson, Michael. Refusal of the Shadow: Surrealism and the Caribbean. New York: Verso Books, 1996.

Seligmann, Katerina Gonzales. “Poetic Productions of Cultural Combat in Tropiques.” The South Atlantic Quarterly 115, no. 3 (2016): 495-512.

Sharpley-Whiting, T. Denean. Negritude Women. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002.

Wilks, Jennifer M. Race, Gender, and Comparative Black Modernism: Suzanne Lacascade, Marita Bonner, Suzanne Césaire, Dorothy West. Baton Rouge, Louisiana: Louisiana State University Press, 2008.