Sartre's "Black Orpheus"

Numbers in brackets refer to footnotes; those in parentheses are to Sartre’s “Black Orpheus” as it appeared in John MacCombie’s translation in The Massachusetts Review, Vol. 6, No. 1 (Autumn, 1964 - Winter, 1965), pp. 13-52. This text is conveniently available online.



     Though in general socio-political readings are a subdivision of theme, and all thematic considerations must in any event be balanced with considerations of form and style, négritude writers themselves have foregrounded race in the movement’s very name, and this fact alone justifies (if not demands) a racial response. Yet racial consciousness can only arise in situations of the encounter, mixing, and conflict among differing ethnic groups, so processes of reaction and creolization inevitably swirl around an identity which in a homogeneous environment would be taken for granted.
     This fact is implicit Senghor’s seminal 1948 Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache. The mere fact of the poets’ use of the French language, reflecting their thoroughly French education is itself evidence of the mixed character of the project. Unlike the writers of the Black Arts Movement, the négritude writers did not shrink from this entanglement with the culture of their colonialist oppressors. Césaire, for instance, declared “What is négritude if not the aggressive proposition of fraternity?” [1] and Senghor called for a “give and take,” resulting in “a cultural métissage,” “a dynamic symbiosis of complementary parts.” According to him “we are all cultural half-castes” and, in fact, “all the great civilizations . . .resulted from interbreeding.” [2]
     The introductory essay in Senghor’s Anthologie by Jean-Paul Sartre titled "Orphée Noir" ("Black Orpheus”) explores this vexed issue, while incidentally guaranteeing the book a wide audience. Sartre may have seemed an unlikely sponsor for these writers from the distant colonies. The Existential philosophy for which he is best-known had, in its prewar form, centered on the individual and had been little concerned with ethical concerns and virtually not at all with political issues.
     The Nazi occupation of France and his nine month term as a prisoner of war altered his views. Upon his return to Paris he became a founder (along with Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and others) of the resistance group Socialisme et Liberté. Later he wrote for Camus’ underground paper Combat. The posture of l’homme engagé, the Existential man of action, became for him a proper, even a heroic, response to the absurdity of the human condition. [3] Until the end of his life, he espoused Marxism and remained active in left agitation.
     The Surrealists on the other hand had expressed revolutionary sentiments, socialist, communist, and anarchist from the start as had the Dadaists before them, and in January of 1927 their leaders joined the Communist Party and encouraged others to do so. [4]
     Apart from political considerations, the alliance of négritude writers with Surrealism might have been an insuperable stumbling block for Sartre as he had fiercely criticized the French Surrealists. He rejected Freud and the very notion of a subconscious, characterizing the movement as “an attempt by adults to cling to the destructive daydreams of their adolescent existence.” To Sartre the Surrealists, though they constituted the most important modern poetic movement, nonetheless signaled the bankruptcy of poetry in the West with their abandonment of rationality and absorption in “verbal games.” In Sartre’s view the quietism and impotence of Surrealist theory is evident in their emigration during the Occupation. [5] “They were the proclaimers of catastrophe in the time of fat cows; in the time of lean cows they have nothing more to say.” [6]
     Thus, though he had little affinity with their artistic method or their French patrons, his sympathies lay with the anti-colonial posture of the négritude writers. “Black Orpheus” explicitly foregrounds both the historical moment and Sartre’s own white bourgeois European subjectivity. It is most significant for him that négritude “is inserted into Universal History, it is no longer a state, nor even an existential attitude, it is a Becoming, the black contribution to the evolution of Humanity.” [7] The “mission” of Africans,” like the proletariat’s, "comes to him from his historic position.” (47) According to Sartre cultural nationalism is a stage that necessarily precedes blacks’ organizing for socialism. (19) [8] In fact Sartre begins with politics: “When you removed the gag that was keeping these black mouths shut, what did you expect?” (13) but the political views remain anchored in his own subjectivity. Opening with the declaration “I am talking now to white men” (16), he nonetheless says that whites cannot write about négritude. (35) Yet his own warning does not stop him. To Sartre the black race is “chosen” because of its suffering. He sometimes even approaches the Christian notion of the redemptive power of Christ’s Passion, praising the “righteous suffering” of Africans, (42) and claiming that they discover their own pride only to abandon it “through supreme generosity.” (50) It is through the experience of “the absurdity of suffering” that blacks come to a truth elusive to the bourgeois. (45-6)
     He conflates the aesthetic and the political, claiming that “black poetry in the French language is, in our time, the only great revolutionary poetry.” (16) In the poems of négritude he finds “the most authentic synthesis of revolutionary aspirations and poetic anxiety . . . essentially pure Poetry.” (35) [9]
     Yet much of Sartre’s appreciation is grounded in the acceptance of old stereotypes but with value judgements reversed, a characteristic evident as well in many European connoisseurs of the primitive. Whites are ruled by a crippling “rationalism, materialism, positivism” (17), while blacks possess feeling rather than rationality and a mystic “rapport” in place of science (36) The beauty of black poetry arises from an “intuitive seizure of the human condition and the still-fresh memory of a historic past [slavery].” (43) [emphasis added] “The black man is closer than we to the great period when, as Mallarmé says, ‘the word creates Gods.’” [10] He is therefore enabled to create objective poetry that approaches the charms of magical practice. (29)
     Sartre is well aware that the whole structure is mythic. He says quite clearly that the poets’ Africa is “an imaginary continent” though at the same time “more real.” In the end “if he turns to look squarely at his négritude, it vanishes in smoke.” (21) Though it might be purely mythological this assignment of racial roles is familiar. From Montesquieu and Chateaubriand to D.H. Lawrence and recent Africaphiles like Ulli Beier and Janheinz Jahn, and such musicians as Peter Gabriel and Mickey Hart, white authors have used non-white peoples to represent their own subconscious. They have used this view of non-European peoples to criticize their own cultural values and to privilege irrationality and passion. Thus Jahn argues that African poetry is timeless and pure, devoid of historical moment [11], specifically because such a myth is meaningful to him as a white European just as many in our own country continue to view our aboriginal people as noble savages though the term has become taboo.
     In fact the trois pères themselves collaborated in the construction of this bipolarity. As students they had encountered the ethnological theories of Leo Frobenius and Maurice Delafoss [12] which seemed to validate the idea of an Africa which was truly civilized, though quite unlike Europe.
     Sartre’s politics, as well as, one guesses, his scientific bias and his common sense, resists racial essentialism, though his reasoning seems at times forced. Whites, he says, have “real human flesh the color of black wine” beneath their “strange livid varnish” of whiteness. (14) In spite of the fact that the poems in Senghor’s anthology “were not written for us,” whites can still “tear off our white tights” in order to become simply men” and thus “become part of the totality from which those black eyes exile us.” (15) [13] “This poetry – which seems racial at first – is actually a hymn by everyone for everyone.” (16) “Anti-racist racism” provides the only way out for both black and white. (18) Négritude so efficaciously explodes dualities that it is androgynous. (43)
     Sartre’s sponsorship of négritude thus rests ideologically on his own revaluation of Surrealism as well as a pair of complementary or contradictory tendencies: the provisional acceptance of racial conventions and a fiercely engaged partisanship in behalf of the exploited. In spite of the undoubted significance of Sartre’s endorsement, his judgements seem driven by his political engagement rather than by aesthetic considerations of the poetry itself. Though such discernment may be ethically admirable, evaluation of art can never rest on historical or biographical considerations. The most righteous political art may be incompetent, while those with despicable views may produce great works. Sartre’s “Black Orpheus” is more significant as a document of mid-twentieth century race relations and the decline of old-style colonialism than as a study of new poetry. Fortunately for the reader, it is also a great piece of writing. Just as the essays of James Baldwin are monuments of magnificent American prose quite apart from their historical significance, “Black Orpheus” is a beautiful essay, lit with passion and structured with dramatic rhetoric.



1. Lylian Kesteloot, Négritude et situation coloniale, p. 84. Her Les ecrivains noirs de langue française (1963) was published in translation as Black Writers in French: A Literary History of Négritude in 1974.

2. Senghor: Prose and Poetry, ed. and trans. by Guy Reed and Clive Wake, p. 97 and 74-5.

3. See Sartre on Cuba and later references to Che Guevara as "not only an intellectual but also the most complete human being of our age." Feeling perhaps that this understated his position, Sartre later called Che the "era's most perfect man."

4. Breton, Aragon, Eluard, Unik and Peret joined the Party, though their movement had earlier been associated with anarchism, including contributing a regular column to the anarchist paper Le Libertaire. The ambivalence of the relation between Communists and Surrealists is evident in Breton’s Second Surrealist Manifesto (1929) in which he declares loyalty to “historical materialism” and promises Surrealists will prove “fully capable of doing our duty as revolutionaries” while expressing the fear that other Communists may regard his group as “strange animals.” In 1932 Breton was expelled from the party not for bourgeois individualism but because of his association with Trotsky. At a Communist-dominated International Congress for the Defence of Culture in 1935 the Surrealists who had attended were denounced and allowed only marginal participation. In 1938 an essay “Towards a Free Revolutionary Art” signed by Breton and Diego Rivera was published in the autumn edition of the Partisan Review. It is, however, reprinted in the collection of Trotsky’s writings, Art and Revolution. In La Clé des Champs (Free Rein), published in 1953, Breton explains that Trotsky was the primary author. In 1952 Breton wrote "It was in the black mirror of anarchism that surrealism first recognised itself."

5. Some intellectuals who were even more actively anti-fascists (such as fellow philosopher Vladimir Jankélévitch) criticized Sartre’s level of militancy during the Occupation.

6. What is Literature, translated by Bernand Frechtman, p. 220.

7. Ibid. 158-9.

8. Americans may be reminded of the “Black Power” espoused by Malik el Shabazz (né Malcolm Little) and Kwame Ture (né Stokeley Carmichael) before their arrival at socialist ideology.

9. Similar sentiments appear in What is Literature and other essays: “For once at least, the most revolutionary plan and the purest poetry come from the same source.” (p. 330)

10. See p. 37 as well. The opposition is restated on the next page as intuition and intelligence. On p. 39 the erotic potency of the black peasant is celebrated. For Sartre, French is an “analytical” language and thus used by blacks only with internal struggle. See p. 23.

11. Jahnheinz Jahn, Neo-African Literature, 207.

12. See, for instance Michael Dash, Before and Beyond Negritude, 537 and A. James Arnold, Modernism and Negritude, 37.

13. Though Sartre surely was unaware of the fact, his image coincides with the usage of the word oyibo for white people in Nigeria. Literally, this means “peeled.”

Seven Poems from Léon-Gontran Damas

Those interested in Damas may also wish to read "A brief History of Negritude" and "Sartre's Black Orpheus," both posted for this same month.



Sale
for Aimé Césaire


I feel laughable
in their shoes
in their dinner jacket
in their stiff shirt
in their detachable collar
in their monocle
in their bowler hat

I feel laughable
with my toes that were not born
to sweat from morning until night’s disrobing
with swaddling that weakens my limbs
and robs from my body its loincloth beauty

I feel laughable
with my neck a factory chimney
with headaches that stop
each time I greet someone

I feel laughable
in their salons
in their manners
in their low bows
in their enormous need for monkeyshines

I feel laughable
with all that conversation
until you are served in mid-afternoon
a bit of hot water
and some rheumy pastries.

I feel laughable
with the theories they shape
to the taste of their needs
of their passions
of their instincts wide open at night
like a doormat

I feel laughable
an accomplice among them
a pander among them
among those bloody hands red and frightening
with the blood of their ci-vi-la-za-tion




They Came Tonight
for Léopold-Sedar Senghor


They came the night the
tom
tom
spun from
rhythm
to
rhythm
frenzy
of eyes
the frenzy of hands
the frenzy
of the feet of statues
SINCE
how many of ME ME ME
are dead
since they came that night when the
tom
tom
spun from
rhythm
to
rhythm
frenzy
of eyes
frenzy
of hands
frenzy
of the feet of statues




Hold Off Now


Hold off now with the blues
the boogie-woogie
the muted trumpet
the mad foot-stomping
the joys of rhythm

Hold off now the swinging sessions
with crowds
overstimulated
by cries of hepcats.

Hold off now dropping out
and bootlicking
and brownnosing
and
the attitude
of those who would be white.

Hold off now for just a bit
The infantile life
and desires
and needs
and narcissism
and individualistic
ego.




Nerve Pain


Nerve pain of a running tap
fills the pitcher of my building’s super
till it’s sucked up by a rainbow.

End the nerve pain of a running tap
that fills the pitcher of my building’s super
till it’s sucked up by a rainbow.

Remove from the running tap
the pitcher of my building’s super
till it’s sucked up by a rainbow.

or sever the hand to the elbow
the rainbow that sucks up
the pitcher of my building’s super
which is filled by the nerve pain
of a running tap.




The Blues
for Robert Romain


Give back my black dolls
that they can dispel
the image of wan whores
selling love and promenading
on the boulevard of my ennui

Give back my black dolls
that they can dispel
the constant image
the unreal image
of heaps of spanked puppets
whose miserable mercy
the wind brings to the nose

Give me the illusion that I’ll no longer need to comfort
the need splayed out
before the snoring mercy
under the world’s unthinking disregard.

Give back my black dolls
so I can play with them
the naïve games that come naturally
lodged in the shadow of my laws
my heart recovered
my daring
I become myself again
newly myself
from what I was Yesterday
yesterday
quite simply
yesterday
when the time of uprooting came

Will they never know this resentment in my heart
the eye of distrust opened too late
they made off with the space that was mine
the clothes
the days
the life
the song
the rhythm
the work
the way
the water
the shacks
the grey smoked earth
the wisdom
the words
the palaver
the elders
the beat
the hands
the tempo
the hands
the foot-stomping
the sun

Give back my black dolls
my black dolls
black dolls
black
black




The Black’s Lament
for Robert Goffin


They gave me back
life
heavier more tired

My present’s overlaid on my past
staring eyes roll with anger
and shame

The days of inexorable
sadness
have never stopped
with the memory
of what had been
my life cut off

It goes on
my dullness
from days gone by
blows from knotted ropes
body burnt
burnt from toe to back
dead flesh
branding irons
of red hot iron
arms broken
under the whip unleashed
under the whip that makes the plantation work
and the sugar mill drink the blood my blood
while the foreman’s pipe shows off to the sky




Position
for J. D.


The days themselves
have assumed the shape
of African masks
indifferent
to any profanation
of quicklime
flattered by
a piano flatters
repeating the same old tune
of moonlight that sighs
any sort at all
in the shrubbery
gondolas
et cetera

Notes on Recent Reading 23 [Naipaul, Dinesen, Spillane]

The Middle Passage (Naipaul)

     V. S. Naipaul says he was encouraged to write this book by Eric Williams, Trinidad’s first premier, yet the book is hardly the work of a booster. Naipaul’s description of a return to Trinidad, the island of his birth, after years in the U.K. and then through Guyana (then British Guiana), Surinam, Martinique, and Jamaica is insightful and vivid and all-too-relevant more than fifty years later. His observations on the societies generated by years of exploitation are devastating and precise. On issues such as the internalization of inferiority by colonial peoples, including an account of the gradations of color consciousness, he is a subtle and revealing informant. The inclusion of documentary material such as excerpts from newspaper accounts is effective whether or not the idea occurred to the author as a means of padding his essays. Some have attacked Naipaul for backward politics, attacks later reinforced by revelations of his sometimes nasty personal life, but such strictures do not affect the book’s value.
Apart from its candor in describing the conditions history has wrought in the Caribbean and the nearby South American mainland, The Middle Passage was also entertaining as an account of a traveler who visited remote places at some risk to health and person. With introductions to local notables and a willingness to penetrate deeply into the bush, Naipaul has written a book both informative and readable.


Out of Africa (Dinesen)

     About to head to the airport, I picked up a mass market paperback of Isak Dinesen’s Out of Africa with a cover picturing Robert Redford and Meryl Streep. Three times during my journey fellow travelers noticed and spoke to me, each time about the film. I suspect a copy of Seven Gothic Tales would have drawn no comment at all.
     One may read Out of Africa as a documentary of colonial life. Though today she would not refer to her African workers as “boys” (or even, indeed, as “natives”), her keen eye and long residence had given her a deep understanding of the Kikuyu and the Somalis with whom she dealt. She records much precise information about the encounter between traditional African and modern British life in a rural environment as well as about the constant challenges of farming itself. This value, however, shrinks in juxtaposition to her beautiful lyrical descriptive passages which occasionally rise to an almost mystical celebration.
     Much as I enjoyed these flights toward the sublime, I relished even more he many oblique, odd, unaccountable anecdotes, sometimes beginning with a phrase like: something very strange happened to me one morning . . .” The informality she allows herself in the section titled “From an Immigrant’s Notebook” accommodates many such reflections on the enigmas everyone encounters which for her seem always touched with the light of the marvelous.
The book’s elegiac tone surely arises from the gap between her exact and detailed yet highly edited idealization of Africa as Eden and the less attractive experiences she underwent while living there. She suppresses much (notably her husband) and a good deal of the narration occurs during a time she was losing friends and lovers as well as ultimately losing the farm. Even with such issues in the background, she manages to strike a note that will resonate even with those who have never left home.


I, the Jury (Spillane)

     Though it has been tied to the Romantic predilection for the thrill of fear, the hard-boiled detective novel in America is more simply seen as satisfying the timeless human fondness for sex and violence evident in Roman amusements and broadside ballads. A late exemplar of the genre, Mickey Spillane’s hero Mike Hammer exaggerates the cynicism and controlled lust of his predecessors Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe. Using a plain style without the striking similes that adorned the work of Hammett and Chandler. Spillane deploys utterly unapologetic super-masculine violence in the service of individual revenge motifs that would have made sense to an Old Norse warrior or an Albanian. To him the even a contemptuous mention of homosexuals (who “were hiding out behind the door when sexes were handed out”) is titillating, and torrid love or sex or simple nakedness scenes appear suddenly at any moment, fulfilling thereby, to a certain prescribed extent, the promise of the lurid covers. Though on good terms with Pat Chambers, the cop on the case, Hammer operates solo, a lone wolf whose identity is wholly self-forged and who owes nothing to society. In this he resembles America’s cowboy heroes. The title indicates the lead character’s anti-social self-sufficiency. Following Spillane crime fiction had exhausted the type exemplified by Mike Hammer’s macho character; the genre had no choice but to take new directions.

The Critical Palimpsest: Black African Literature through White American Eyes

(This was originally presented to the New York College English Association a dozen years ago. The text is unchanged.  the citation method, odd for me, must have been what they wanted.)


     Once, talking theory of literature in a graduate seminar, I ventured to mention the ancient notion that one end of art is to give pleasure. "We don't," the professor chided, "talk about our personal lives here, Mr. Seaton." That seemed to me wrong-headed at the time, and it still does. I came of age, after all, in the 60s among friends who insisted that theory and practice should be fused and that the personal is the political. For this reason, before approaching African literature, I would like to give some account of how I come to be speaking on this topic. Through explaining the particular appeal of African writing to me I may be able to suggest its value for you and to make some observations about how we all read and why.
     I am, of course, anything but original in my practice of subjective criticism. From the pseudo-Longinus through Hazlitt and genteel 1920s PMLA impressionism to the aggressively ironic decentered subject that speaks in some recent critical discussion, most readers have assumed the final authority of their own reading experience. Yet, many of us remain unself-conscious and therefore unapologetic New Critics and, as David Bleich notes, "Those discussing a work [today] usually pretend that they did not experience it in a direct emotional way" (7). I could be grand and invent a new jargon by which we academic homeboys can recognize each other, or grandiose and announce a new school of confessional criticism which holds the potential of catapulting professors to afternoon daytime TV, or I could be familiar and recognize that I simply wish to talk as I would among friends.
     It is not for me to delineate the value of African literature for Africans or for African-Americans any more than I would venture to imagine how Wole Soyinka might be received by a Chinese critic or by our great-grandchildren. I could learn from their insights, but in the end the readings I offer can only arise from my own life.
     I grew up in a suburb that barred not only black people and the poor, but also Jews and Asians. The Democratic Party was virtually nonexistent while the John Birch Society and the Christian Anti-Communist Crusade were active. So, like others in similar environments, I listened to a lot of jazz and blues, marched with Dr. King, and supported the Panthers. My brother married a black woman, as did a stepbrother and a stepsister. I worked with the Vice Lords in VISTA, taught in Bedford-Stuyvesant and in the bush of Nigeria's Bendel State not far from old slave forts and new oil refineries on the coast.
     What brought me to those humid mangrove swamps? What brought me here today? White guilt or the radical chic that led Langston Hughes' characters, the Carraways, to "go in" for Negroes? (19) Another 60s formula held that liberals act out of charity, feeling pity for the unfortunate, while radicals seek their own liberation. But this may be just self-dramatizing rhetoric for the commonplace practice of seeking self-knowledge in the other: in love across the gender line, in exotic travel (so fashionable among the well-educated), in my field of comparative literature, in cultural studies that address that other we find beneath our noses in Family Feud, bumper stickers, and Donald Duck. Most would agree that one who knows only English literature cannot know literature nor can one who knows only European-American culture know what it is to be human. One must triangulate experience to analyze either oneself or general truths.
     Now the multiplication of perspective is inherent in all literature (most of us expect our students to "broaden their knowledge" through reading), but certain texts foreground it. The sharpness of vision available to the well-read and the well-traveled provided they keep eyes and minds open, is not theirs alone. It is inherent in texts from "the other half," and it may be valuable to readers who do not share the author's place in the structure of society. Surely the phenomenon is evident in the prominence of Irish writers in the English literature of the last century, of Jews and, more recently, a whole spectrum of ethnics in America, of writers with a foot in each of two cultures (like Rushdie and Ishigoru), as well as in those who resuscitate versions of the archaic such as Gary Snyder, Diane di Prima, and Jerome Rothenberg.
     The commonest American form of the other is racial, and Leslie Fiedler was right when he identified the color contradiction at the heart of a long line of American classics. Hegel's master/slave dialectic hovers in the background as the split vision of the Black writer becomes explicit in American culture. The locus classicus is DuBois:

After the Egyptian and the Indian, the Greek and the Roman, the Teuton and the Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world, -- a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness -- an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. (45)

     In spite of the prophetic implication of second sight and the masterful rhetoric which authenticates the claim, DuBois seems to be describing an illness. More recently Cornel West described the Black writer as "languishing at the interface of Black and white cultures." (hooks 14) But Richard Wright, whose Native Son was also, paradoxically, an Outsider, claimed that his "split subjectivity" placed him "ahead" of white writers (Gilroy 172). The "underground" of Wright (in "The Man Who Lived Underground") and Ellison (in the Prologue to Invisible Man) as well as the "undergrounds" of literary bohemia and political struggle offer a physical image for this dual vision. Baldwin notes the Fanon-like rage he feels when he is seen as a curiosity in Europe, while the Swiss "cannot be strangers anywhere in the world," but proceeds to the insight that "The interracial drama acted out on the American continent has not only created a new black man, it has created a new white man, too . . . This world is white no longer, and it will never be white again" (175), while also noting that "the Western world has created me" (Voices, 661). A similar process of racial dialectic, of creative creolization is evident in the formation of jazz which rose out of a mixture of African and European musical modes and grew in the interplay of interpretation between the white Original Dixieland Jass Band and King Oliver, Sinatra and Sarah Vaughn (Jones).
     White artists have long been aware of the value of Africa for their own work. Picasso's appropriation of African sculpture, the dadaist modohojo mumbo-jumbo (Huelsenbeck), Josephine Baker and the Revue Negre, 30s leftist use of Black materials, and the embrace of jazz exiles as well as of writers like Wright and Baldwin, all testify to Europe's long acceptance of African aid while seeking for ways to be modern. Gilroy's The Black Atlantic details more of the connections than I can mention here.
     The radical potential of Black art I wish to establish, though, comes not from sources free of European contamination (if such a thing exists). I say nothing here of traditional art in which the double consciousness of which I now speak is replaced by the bipolar oppositions traced by Levi-Strauss or of the poets of oral literature, those funambulist tricksters on the taut rope of irony and contradiction. Examples of how such texts can challenge the European reader's imaginative stretch and reward with rich misprision abound in the back files of Alcheringa.
     The first significant notice European readers gave African authors came with the publication in 1948 of Senghor's Anthologie de la nouvelle poesie negre et malgache. A central text for the European appropriation of African literature is provided by Jean-Paul Sartre's introduction.

It is because [the African or African-American poet] is already exiled from himself that he feels this need to declare himself. So he begins with an exile, a double exile. To the exile of his heart, the exile of his body offers a magnificent image. He is most of the time in Europe, in the cold, amid grey crowds; he dreams of Port-au-Prince, in Haiti. But that is not all: at Port-au-Prince he is already in exile. The slave-dealers have snatched his fathers from Africa and scattered them. And all the poems of this book . . .offer us the same mystic geography. A hemisphere; far down, making the first of the three concentric circles lies the land of exile, colourless Europe; then comes the dazzling ring of the Islands and the childhood that dances in circles around Africa; Africa makes the last circle, navel of the world, pole of all black poetry, Africa bright, burning and oily like a snakeskin, Africa of fire and rain, between being and becoming, more real than the endless boulevards of pleasure, but destroying Europe by its black invisible rays, beyond arrest, Africa, imaginary continent. . .

     Sartre accurately notes that this Africa is imaginary, a continent viewed through the refracting lens of the critic reading its poets. But yet, to use the terms of Aristotle's Poetics, for that very reason the textual Africa is more real ("more philosophical and higher") than history. Of course the information it contains describes not the Black poets but the French author in mid twentieth century. Still, Sartre was correct in calling Black poetry "the true revolutionary poetry of our day" (in Black Orpheus), not because of its essential African qualities, but because of its relation to twentieth century European thought. A revolution, after all, requires two sides.

While Richard Wright was socializing with the existentialists, Norman Mailer, a spiritual son of Sartre in the U.S.A. prophesied that Black Americans would inspire "a psychically armed rebellion" against which the "mean hypocrisies of mass conformity will no longer work" (356). Kerouac said he wished he was a Negro (Baldwin Price 297) and delighted in the birth of bebop emerging from artists "misplaced in the white nation."
     From the start, then, from both Black and white perspectives, the significance of the American racial experience lies in structural relations, in encounters; it is a radically mulatto phenomenon. The same rich intellectual and artistic miscegenation is evident in colonial and postcolonial literatures.
     To encode the simultaneous multiple perspectives of such experience in literary texts, a whole array of possible forms is available. The double consciousness of the author means that every convention implies its own reversal, ironic use, and doubly ironic return to sincerity, to mention only a few of the possibilities. I have elsewhere suggested a systematic taxonomy for these transformations. Here I can only sketch the outlines of the system by pointing out a few examples.
     One inevitable type of African writing would be the inadequate imitation of European models. These works in form and content would submit to colonialist assumptions. There are ample African parallels to Phyllis Wheatley's "'Twas mercy brought me from my pagan land." But the most available information offered by texts of this sort is simply a paler repetition of the culture of the more powerful people, offering little of value beyond the simplest historical propositions for either Africans or Europeans.
     The plot soon thickens, however. The first African novelist to gain celebrity was Amos Tutuola whose idiosyncratic Palm-wine Drinkard was praised by adventurous white critics in the 50s (Dylan Thomas describes it on the paperback cover as a "brief, thronged, grisly, and bewitching story"). The same qualities that gave the work success, though, inspired resentment by African critics who saw its celebrity as patronizing because it was the work of a naif. Tutuola was useful to Europeans in the same way as mental patients had allowed Rouault to follow out Romantic assumptions by appropriating their work to create the category of art brut.
     In many colonial and postcolonial texts the two cultures are in open conflict. Achebe's Things Fall Apart, which is a sort of narrative museum of Ibo culture, is the best known. A whole genre of first novels by educated Africans concern the plight of a bright young lad who becomes alienated from his own people through his success in school (Ngugi's Weep Not, Child is one of the best). The tone may be nostalgic, tragic, or revolutionary, but Europe and Africa are adversaries and Europe is the victor.
     The work of Senghor, who called himself "a cultural mulatto" (Moore and Beier 19), of Aime Cesaire of Martinique, author of the seminal Cahier d'un retour au pays natal and originator of the term negritude, and Leon Damas of French Guinea embraced European racial mythology while reversing the usual value judgments. The same process is evident in Black nationalist theories from Wright's "Blueprint for the Negro Writer" to past polemics of Amiri Baraka and the reassertion of hoodoo by Ishmael Reed. White authors, too, have used non-European peoples to criticize their own cultural values and to privilege irrationality and passion from Montesquieu and Chateaubriand to D.H. Lawrence and recent Africaphiles like Ulli Beier and Janheinz Jahn and such musicians as Peter Gabriel and Mickey Hart. Jahn argues that African poetry is timeless and pure, devoid of historical moment, specifically because such a myth is meaningful to him as a white European (207) just as many in our own country continue to view our aboriginal people as noble savages though the term has become taboo.
     Africa before the involvement of Europe is "always already escaped" yet "always already inscribed" to use Derrida's formulae (159, 266) in Senghor where "dark pulse of Africa in the mist of lost villages" (48) is associated with the bush country of the Freudian subconscious more than with any geography. Africa means perfect women, magic, and the ancestors, because of his own alienation (he calls himself "exiled" [Moore and Beier, 49] and says he can only "breath the smell of our dead"). For this member of the Council of Europe and of the French National Assembly as for Ron Karenga and all cultural nationalists, race is fetishized and finally definitive. Thus Senghor speaks of Blacks as a "newer" race and a "luckier" one. Africans possess an Edenic primeval character for him. They are physical, mysterious, strong, natural, "beautiful like the first men that were created by [God's] brown hands." Is this not congruent with the fashionable Carraways satirized by Hughes who exclaim over their Black caller: "He is the jungle" (21)?
     Senghor's poem "Totem" describes his need to conceal some "ancestor," some "animal protector," abstract and never-specified, but identified with the author's "faithful blood." Surely both the idealizing and the vagueness are markers signifying not Africa itself but the appropriation of the theme of Africa by French intellectuals, Black and white. It is noteworthy that it is in “New York” that Senghor hears the "distant beating of your nocturnal heart, rhythm and blood of the tom-tom, tom-tom blood, and tom-tom" (57) The concept is so thoroughly European that Senghor insists on the word "tom-tom," a French use of a British version of a Hindi word for which many West African analogues are available.
     It is impossible today to explore adequately even a single example of African literature that transcends the contradiction of cultures and produces a new synthesis. The citation of a single line will have to suffice. The composition and criticism of African literature has always been highly political, and the best authors such as Soyinka, Armah, and Ngugi wa Thiongo have been attacked for not asserting the reductive revolutionary thematics Marx himself deplored. Ayi Kwei Armah's The Beautyful Ones are Not Yet Born includes a series of graffiti expressing popular reaction to the "Mercedes socialists" of Nkrumah's regime: "Money sweet pass all, Who born fool, Socialism chop make I chop, Contrey broke, You broke not so?, Pray for detention, Jailman chop free" (106). The free citizen under a soi-disant revolutionary government wishes to be jailed. Here is neither traditional Africa nor internalized racism nor a Romantic resurrection of tradition nor simple opposition. Yet Armah was condemned for his "unattractive" picture of Ghanaian life and in response produced the markedly inferior but politically acceptable Two Thousand Seasons.
     I base my readings of African literature on two critical moves: the value of the multiplication of perspective and the inevitability of subjective interpretation based on the reader's experience. But both are in fact inherent in all reading.
     The very act of reading implies a doubling of perspective since the vision of writer and reader can never be identical. The long critical tradition that associates irony, ambiguity, and polysemy with the aesthetic text appears in such formulations as Mukarovsky's analysis of the constant renewal of aesthetic norms (94-5) and the principle that such norms are "largely effective in their violation" (26-7). This is close to what Lotman calls "creolization" which for him increases semiotic value (24-5) and what Eco calls "ideological code switching" (289-90). And, finally, deconstruction offers its own vocabulary for the same critical fact: writing as trope, as trick, as under erasure, as a hinge, a fissure, as truth and lie at once. Here, too, is the source of those twentieth century poetic trends that intentionally set out to overturn preconceptions: Dada, Surrealism, and their offspring oppose all received ideas regardless of content.
     And surely all readings are subjective. In spite of the lingering influence of critics like M. K. Abrams who would maintain the text's unitary meaning and the authority of the writer's intention, most modern readers realize that, to borrow a vignette from Barthes, Bossuet in the hands of Gide as he floats down the Congo (29) could hardly be the same author as he had been in seventeenth century France. If we in the humanities have superseded the aping of the hard sciences that encouraged the collection of quantifiable data and the proliferation of jargon, it is only to attempt to trump physics by impenetrability and utterly detached cool irony. But far from being a liability we should disguise, subjectivity demands attention as our only access to reality. It was not to absorb the exotic so much as to become acquainted with the self that Artaud ate peyote with the Tarahumara and Eco attended the ceremonies of the candomble; this is what led me to Africa and, I think, a part of what led us all to literature. For in fact doubled vision is the tool by which we can best cope with the biases inherent in our own nature and experience, not by trading them for some "better" set and mistaking it for a new-found objectivity, but by being aware that biases cannot be banished to take them into account.
     On the wall of my library is an engraving of Asian art from an eighteenth century French book. The draftsmanship is neoclassical; the facial expressions belong to Hogarth's characters rather than to Buddha; some figures appear oddly antic and weird as their originals must have done to the artist who likely knew little of the East. One robed figure grimaces and scrapes his ear. So the semiotic signal has passed from a Chinese artist to a European one to a twentieth century critic born in the Midwest and then to you. The truth here may seem to be receding, but in fact, of course, all culture is transmitted through inexact and mutating imitation every day. What distinguishes this artifact is that several levels of inscription, several takes and mistakes in reading are evident. Comparative studies call attention to the leaps between minds, the critical moments of interpretation when the spectator suddenly sees the palimpsest for what it is. We never read a simple text, for it always can only be a text upon a text upon a text leading toward, but never reaching, the original and purely naked truth in glory. And we continue to read and write and teach, led always by the reflected mirage of that same beautiful truth on ahead, a truth which may at times be proclaimed by the African hipicat, which, if one can believe Dillard, is a Wolof word meaning "man who is aware or has his eyes open" (119). If it is dark underground, outside is only "deeper darkness," and we must "learn a way of seeing in the dark world" (Wright in Voices, 147).


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