Robin D.G. Kelley: A Conversation on Suzanne Césaire, Surrealism, Négritude, and Black Feminism

Returning to New Day Jazz this afternoon in the 5 o'clock hour, Robin D.G. Kelley, for a discussion of Suzanne Césaire, and the recently published collection of her writings for Tropiques, The Great Camouflage.

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Artist	Song	Album	Label
Gato Barbieri	La China Leoncia Arreo La Correntinada Trajo Entre La Muchachada La Flor De La Juventud	Chapter One: Latin America	Impulse!
Michael White	The Land of Spirit and Light	The Land of Spirit and Light	Impulse!
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Andrew Hill	Siete Ocho	Judgement!	Blue Note
Bobby Hutcherson	Catta	Dialogue	Blue Note
Max Roach featuring Abbey Lincoln	Garvey's Ghost	Percussion Bitter Sweet	Impulse!
Charles Mingus	Passions of a Man	Oh Yeah!	Atlantic
Charles Mingus	Tonight at Noon	Tonight at Noon	Atlantic
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Art Ensemble of Chicago featuring Fontella Bass	Theme de Yoyo	Les Stances a Sophie	Nessa
Air	G.v.E.	Air Time	Nessa
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Andrew Hill	Diddy Wah	One for One	Blue Note
Andrew Hill	Poinsetta	One for One	Blue Note
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Duke Ellington	Fleurette Africaine (African Flower)	Money Jungle	United Artists
Interview with Robin D.G. Kelley by Justin Desmangles	Interview with Robin D.G. Kelley by Justin Desmangles	Interview with Robin D.G. Kelley by Justin Desmangles	Interview with Robin D.G. Kelley by Justin Desmangles
Duke Ellington	Fleurette Africaine (African Flower)	Money Jungle	United Artists
Airbreak
Bob Dorough	Small Day Tomorrow	Beginning to See the Light	Laissez-Faire
Ernestine Anderson	Sunny	Sunshine	Concord

Solar Throat Slashed: Part Two with Clayton Eshleman

Show description for Sunday 8/28/2011 @ 3:00 PM - 6:00 PM

Our guest today on the 5 o'clock hour, Clayton Eshleman (pictured at right), discussing his most recent work, in collaboration with A. James Arnold, Solar Throat Slashed, the unexpurgated 1948 edition of the masterwork by Aimé Césaire.

Soleil cou coupé (Solar Throat Slashed) is Aimé Césaire’s most explosive collection of poetry. Animistically dense, charged with eroticism and blasphemy, and imbued with an African and Vodun spirituality, this book takes the French surrealist adventure to new heights and depths. A Césaire poem is an intersection at which metaphoric traceries create historically aware nexuses of thought and experience, jagged solidarity, apocalyptic surgery, and solar dynamite. The original 1948 French edition of Soleil cou coupé has a dense magico-religious frame of reference. In the late 1950s, Césaire was increasingly politically focused and seeking a wider audience, when he, in effect, gelded the 1948 text—eliminating 31 of the 72 poems, and editing another 29. Until now, only the revised 1961 edition, called Cadastre, has been translated. The revised text lacks the radical originality of Soleil cou coupé. This Wesleyan edition presents all the original poems en face with the new English translations. Includes an introduction by A. James Arnold and notes by Clayton Eshleman.

“Not only do Eshleman and Arnold give us excellent translations of Césaire’s at times syntactically knotty, etymologically abstruse, and semantically bedeviling verse; they also contextualize the poems—with an introduction by Arnold and endnotes by Eshleman—with crucial historical information and lucid discussions of the complexities of the poems’ language.”—Brent Hayes Edwards, author of The Practice of Diaspora

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Aime Cesaire: Solar Throat Slashed, Part One with A. James Arnold

Show description for Sunday 8/21/2011 @ 3:00 PM - 6:00 PM

Our guest today on the 5 o'clock hour, A. James Arnold, discussing his most recent work, in collaboration with Clayton Eshelman, Solar Throat Slashed, the unexpurgated 1948 edition of the masterwork by Aimé Césaire. A. JAMES ARNOLD is an emeritus professor of French at the University of Virginia. He is the lead editor of Césaire's complete literary works in French (in progress) and author of Modernism and Negritude: The Poetry and Poetics of Aimé Césaire.

Soleil cou coupé (Solar Throat Slashed) is Aimé Césaire’s most explosive collection of poetry. Animistically dense, charged with eroticism and blasphemy, and imbued with an African and Vodun spirituality, this book takes the French surrealist adventure to new heights and depths. A Césaire poem is an intersection at which metaphoric traceries create historically aware nexuses of thought and experience, jagged solidarity, apocalyptic surgery, and solar dynamite. The original 1948 French edition of Soleil cou coupé has a dense magico-religious frame of reference. In the late 1950s, Césaire was increasingly politically focused and seeking a wider audience, when he, in effect, gelded the 1948 text—eliminating 31 of the 72 poems, and editing another 29. Until now, only the revised 1961 edition, called Cadastre, has been translated. The revised text lacks the radical originality of Soleil cou coupé. This Wesleyan edition presents all the original poems en face with the new English translations. Includes an introduction by A. James Arnold and notes by Clayton Eshleman.

“Not only do Eshleman and Arnold give us excellent translations of Césaire’s at times syntactically knotty, etymologically abstruse, and semantically bedeviling verse; they also contextualize the poems—with an introduction by Arnold and endnotes by Eshleman—with crucial historical information and lucid discussions of the complexities of the poems’ language.”—Brent Hayes Edwards, author of The Practice of Diaspora

“Since Césaire first came into our view, he has seemed to some of us to be, with Breton and Artaud, one of the three truly unbounded poets of Surrealism—not so much lyrical, as with some other, more readily accessible poets (Eluard and Desnos the finest among them), but as Diderot had it over two centuries ago: the maker of a poetry that was and had to be ‘barbaric, vast and wild.’ It is the genius of the present gathering to rescue from previous editings and literary compromises the full force of Césaire’s remarkable 1948 work, Soleil cou coupé/Solar Throat Slashed. The result—in both the original French and in Eshleman’s and Arnold’s remarkable and no-holds-barred translation—is a reconstituted masterwork of the twentieth century and ample grist for the century to come.”—Jerome Rothenberg, editor of Technicians of the Sacred

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Rain by Aime Cesaire

After I had by iron by fire by ash visited the most celebrated places in history
after I had by ash fire earth and stars courted with my wild dog and leechlike
fingernails the authoritarian field of protoplasms
I found myself as usual in the old days in the middle of a factory of vipers'
nests in a ganges of cacti in an elaboration of thorny pilgrimages - and as
usual I was salivated by limbs and tongues born a thousand years before
the earth - and as usual I made my morning prayer the one that protects
me from the evil eye and that I address to the rain under the aztec color of
its name

Rain who so gently washes a perverse injection from the earth's academic
vagina
All-powerful rain who on the chopping block makes the fingers of the
rock's leap
Rain who force-feeds an army of worms no mulberry forest could nourish
Rain inspired strategist who pushes across the mirror of the air your zigzag
army of numberless riverbanks that cannot not surprise the best-kept
boredom
Rain wasp nest beautiful milk whose piglets we are
Rain I see your hair which is a perpetual explosion of sandbox tree fireworks
your hair of misinformation promptly denied
Rain who in your most reprehensible excesses takes care not to forget that
Chiriqui maidens pull suddenly from their night corsage a lamp of thrilling
fireflies
Inflexible rain who lays eggs whose larvae are so proud that nothing can
make them mount the stern of the sun and salute it like an admiral
Rain who is a fresh fish fan behind which courteous races hide to watch
victory with its dirty feet pass by
Greetings to you queen rain in the depths of the eternal goddess whose hands
are multiple and whose destiny is unique thou sperm thou brain thou fluid
Rain capable of everything except washing away the blood that flows on the
fingers of the murderers of entire peoples surprised in the soaring forests
of innocence







Aime Cesaire (photo by Denise Colomb)
(translation by A. James Arnold & Clayton Eshleman)
Solar Throat Slashed, The Unexpurgated 1948 Edition, Wesleyan University Press

Homage to Aime Cesaire in Poetry & Jazz

New Day Jazz Justin Desmangles Jazz music for lovers and the lonely. Genre Jazz Miss the Show? MP3 Stream (128kbps, broadband) MP3 Stream (32kbps, dial-up) [View Past Shows] [View Upcoming Shows]

Show Description for Sunday 06/26/2011 This afternoon, a special celebration of Aime Cesaire, honoring his birthday, June 26, 1913. Also, a new essay by Cecil Brown, below. If Racism is Over, Why are Whites Still Kicking Me in the Ass? Next week, Amiri Baraka reviews the new biography, Malcolm X, A Life Of Reinvention, by Manning Marable. Painting by Romare Bearden, 16 Mill Hands Lunch Bucket

	Artist	Song	Album
	Bud Powell	Cleopatra's Dream	The Scene Changes	Blue Note
	JulianAdderley	Alison's Uncle	Somethin' Else	Blue Note
	John Agard	Stereotype	An Evening Of International Poetry	Alliance Records
	John Agard	Grafitti In A British Rail Waiting Room	An Evening Of International Poetry	Alliance Records
	Max Roach featuring Anthony Braxton	Dance Griot	Birth And Rebirth	Black Saint
	Walt Dickerson Sirone Andrew Cyrille	Life Rays	Life Rays	Soul Note
-----------------------------air break-----------------------------
	Walt Dickerson & Sun Ra	Visions	Visions	Steeple Chase
	Mahmood Jamal	A Gift Of Blood	An Evening Of International Poetry	Alliance Records
	Mahmood Jamal	Silence	An Evening Of International Poetry	Alliance Records
	Gil Evans / Steve Lacy	Reincarnation Of A Lovebird	Paris Blues	Owl
	Steve Lacy	Virgin Jungle	The Door	Novus
	Okot P'Bitek	Acholi Song / Song Of The Prisoner	An Evening Of International Poetry	Alliance Records
	Clifford Brown	George's Dilemma	Study In Brown	Emarcy
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	Aime Cesaire (read by Justin Desmangles)	Rain (translated by A. James Arnold & Clayton Eshleman)	Solar Throat Slashed	Wesleyan Universtiy Press
	Jackie Byard	Parisian Thoroughfare	The Jaki Byard Experience	Prestige
	Mari Evans (read by Roscoe Lee Browne & James Earl Jones)	This Ain't No Mass Thing	A Hand Is On The Gate	Verve - Folkways
	Sam Rivers	Involution	Dimensions & Extensions	Blue Note
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	Aime Cesaire (read by Justin Desmangles)	Secret Society (translated by A. James Arnold & Clayton Eshleman)	Solar Throat Slashed	Wesleyan Universtiy Press
	Aime Cesaire (read by Justin Desmangles)	Attack On Morals (translated by A. James Arnold & Clayton Eshleman)	Solar Throat Slashed	Wesleyan Universtiy Press
	Rahsaan Roland Kirk	Rahsaanica	Natural Black Inventions: Root Strata	Atlantic
	Rahsaan Roland Kirk	Raped Voices	Natural Black Inventions: Root Strata	Atlantic
	Rahsaan Roland Kirk	Haunted Feelings	Natural Black Inventions: Root Strata	Atlantic
	Solar Throat Slashed	Prelude Back Home	Natural Black Inventions: Root Strata	Atlantic
-----------------------------air break-----------------------------
	Max Roach featuring Andy Bey	Members, Don't Git Weary	Members, Don't Git Weary	Atlantic

Poetry, Jazz & Freedom by Rene Menil

It is the existence in itself of jazz, of major importance to us, that has more than any critical thinking caused us to understand the stylistic character and content of a work in its historical context and even its limitations and to grant the value of spontaneity to these works only.

In its essence jazz is improvisation. If one created a theory of esthetics using jazz as a basis, it would mean creating it using as a means the invention of the marvelous as one went along. Because jazz itself is the result of a process using the very contradictions of being and its style consists of forming by means of music or any other means (note this also applies to poetry) - emotions and images in progression, as they occur in the minds eye. Any blockage, any laziness, any rigidification of life threatens the true development of this delicate crystallization.

No rhythm is set before the beginning.

No meaning is conceived before hand.

No rhythm, no meaning except a passion for being - a being dedicated to a desire that demands its realization - or its substitution in the sublimation of "song."

The musician doesn't know, cannot know, what his next note will be, nor will he know his next phrase, or the next possible adventure.

But he leaps like a rope-dancer on the tight rope of chance.

A work of beauty is a work of chance.

However, how many agree with Goethe when he says that the only works of lasting value are works of chance?

At this point our existence is drugged by the poison of eternity. Jazz is one of the best antidotes to that poison, creating in us the feeling of the moment, of transition.

For us, we do not hesitate to view the moment, whatever it is called, as the arena where all the problems that are common to humankind must be resolved from the world of music or any other. In the moment is found all the previous instants to a particular action in the process of becoming - since, in any thing that exists "that which has been superceded is at the same time also preserved, and in losing its immediate and apparent existence, is not destroyed." (Hegel)

The moment of being exists in the present, however, the present itself exists in a particular existence that is the outcome of its extension through duration in time.

Thus, for things that exist, there is no contradiction that cannot be reconciled between the past and the present except the one that exists in the minds of those who attempt to abstract its essence. Likewise in a society there is no contradiction between creations that are contemporary and those that are the past, between new works (not yet accepted) and the existing culture; the new creation although it may not be "valued" or regarded presently as valuable - combines all the resources of that particular social group that is being considered.

A poet is not contemporary because he is familiar with the past or has rejected it, but because he exists as a dialectical outcome of those stages of past existence. Thus at the same time, he is a living negation and a living preservation of all the old cultural forms. His contemporary aspect will be broader and of a greater value because of the fact that it is a totality formed of the past.

Cultural traditions that are reflected by the poet cannot serve as a model, there is no model for what has not yet come into existence. It will exist, however, as a pillar of the past and thus situates the poet in his time inflexibly; it makes him a poet who is modern in a time that is modern.

So much for the freedom of poetry: before us the future unformed.








Tropiques, no. 11 (1944); translated by Juliet Petremont

Taken from the anthology,
Black, Brown & Beige: Surrealist Writings From Africa and the Diaspora
edited by Franklin Rosemont & Robin D.G. Kelley
University of Texas, 2009