Cahier d'un retour au pays natal

Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (1939), translated as 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, that mixes poetry and prose to express his thoughts on the cultural identity of black Africans in a colonial setting.

History

After a rejection by a French publisher, 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.[1][2] Cahier was subsequently published in an expanded version in 1947 by Editions Pierre Bordas, introduced with an essay by André Breton that had first appeared in 1943 in the New York-based review Hémisphêres under the title "Un grand poete noir".[1] In his introduction Breton called the poem "nothing less than the greatest lyrical monument of our times."[3] 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."[4]

The poem was adapted as a one-man show by Cy Grant.[5]

Selected editions
  • Return to My Native Land, translated by John Berger and Anna Bostock, with an introduction by Mazisi Kunene, Penguin Books, 1969. Illustrated by Peter de Francia, Archipelago Books, 2014, ISBN 9781935744948.
  • Notebook of a Return to My Native Land / Cahier d'un retour au pays natal, translated by Mireille Rosello with Annie Pritchard. French-English bilingual edition. Bloodaxe Contemporary French Poets: 4, 1995, ISBN 9781852241841.

References
  1. "Aimé Césaire", in Donald E. Herdeck (ed.), Caribbean Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical-Critical Encyclopedia, Washington, DC: Three Continents Press, 1979, pp. 324–25.
  2. "Commentary", Notebook of a Return to the Native Land (Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2001), p. 53.
  3. "A Great Black Poet", Notebook of a Return to the Native Land (Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2001), p. xiii.
  4. Thomas, Bonnie, "Cahier d'un retour au pays natal", The Literary Encyclopedia, 30 March 2008.
  5. "Return to my Native Land", Cy Grant website.
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