Cahier d'un retour au pays natal

Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (first published in 1939, with two revised editions in 1947 and a final edition in 1956), variously translated as Notebook of a Return to My Native Land, Return to My Native Land, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, or Journal of a Homecoming, is a book-length poem by Martinican writer Aimé Césaire. Considered his masterwork, the book mixes poetry and prose to express his thoughts on the cultural identity of black Africans in a colonial setting.

History

After a rejection by the journal Cahiers du sud, Césaire submitted the manuscript of the poem to Georges Pelorson, director of the Parisian periodical Volontés, who published it in August 1939, just as Césaire was returning to Martinique to take up a post as a teacher. Césaire continued to revise the poem and published two expanded versions with more surrealist elements in 1947, first through Brentano's in New York and later Éditions Bordas in Paris, with an introductory essay by André Breton that had first appeared in 1943 in the New York-based review Hémisphêres under the title "Un grand poete noir". In his introduction Breton called the poem "nothing less than the greatest lyrical monument of our times."

A "definitive edition" was published in 1956 by Présence Africaine. In this final edition, which has further additions and revisions, Césaire deleted some material from the 1939 and 1947 editions, "leading the reader away from the spiritual sacrifice of the speaker and toward a sense of collective socialist action", as Arnold and Eshleman put it. Alex Gil argues for a holistic reading of the entire textual history of the poem through its religious, surrealist, and Marxian phases, not just the final edition, noting that "the poem's central theme and approach remain unchanged" throughout the four editions.

According to Bonnie Thomas, Cahier d'un retour au pays natal was a turning point in French Caribbean literature: "Césaire’s groundbreaking poem laid the foundations for a new literary style in which Caribbean writers came to reject the alienating gaze of the Other in favour of their own Caribbean interpretation of reality."

Adaptations and tributes

The poem was adapted as a one-man show by Cy Grant, which he performed in 1978 at the Lyttelton Theatre and at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs, as well as on tour for two years.

A passage from the poem provided the title for a volume of Selected Writings by C. L. R. James, At the Rendezvous of Victory (Allison and Busby, 1984), as well as an epigraph for that volume, much quoted by other writers, such as Edward Said.

English translations

Memorandum on My Martinique.