Suzanne Césaire

Suzanne Césaire (/seɪˈzɛər/; French: [sezɛʁ]; née Roussi; born 11 August 1915 in Martinique, died 16 May 1966 in Yvelines, France) was a writer, teacher, scholar, anti-colonial and feminist activist, and a Surrealist. She co-founded and edited the Martinique cultural journal Tropiques, along with René Ménil and her husband Aimé Césaire.

Quotes

• The theorist should not let us forget the poet.
  • "André Breton, Poet" in Tropiques no. 3 (1941). Translated from the French by Guy Ducornet and Franklin Rosemont for Surrealist Women: An International Anthology (1998)

• No longer is it a matter of the narrow roads where traditional beauty is offered in its clarity and obviousness to the admiration of the crowds. The crowds were taught the victory of intelligence over the world and the submission of the forces of nature to man.
  Now it is a question of seizing and admiring a new art which leaves humankind in its true condition, fragile and dependent, and which nevertheless, in the very spectacle of things ignored or silenced, opens unsuspected possibilities to the artist.
  And this is the domain of the strange, the Marvelous, and the fantastic, a domain scorned by people of certain inclinations. Here is the freed image, dazzling and beautiful, with a beauty that could not be more unexpected and overwhelming. Here are the poet, the painter, and the artist, presiding over the metamorphoses and the inversions of the world under the sign of hallucination and madness....Here at last the world of nature and things makes direct contact with the human being who is again in the fullest sense spontaneous and natural. Here at last is the true communion and the true knowledge, chance mastered and recognized, the mystery now a friend and helpful.
  • "Domain of the Marvelous," letter in the "Surrealist Number" of Vine Magazine (1941)

• Our problem now is to determine whether the Ethiopian attitude that we discovered was the very essence of our whole way of living can be the point of departure for a viable cultural style, however grandiose this may seem.
  It is exalting to imagine on these tropical islands, restored finally to their inner truth, a lasting and fertile harmony between humankind and the earth--under the sign of the plant.
  We are at last called on to know who we are. Splendors and hopes await us.
  Surrealism has restored to us some of our chances. Now it is up to us to find others. In its light.
  Understand me well: It is not at all a question of going back, to resurrect an African past which we have learned to know and respect. It is rather a question of mobilizing all the mingled living forces on this soil where race is the result of an endless mixing, of becoming conscious of the formidable mass of diverse energies that we have heretofore locked up within ourselves. We must now put them to use in all their fullness, unswervingly, and without falsification. So much for those who think we are mere dreamers!
  The most troubling reality is ours.
  We shall act.
  This land of ours can only become what we want it to be.
  • "Discontent of a Civilization" published in French in Tropiques no. 5 (1942), translated into English by Penelope Rosemont for Surrealist Women: An International Anthology (1998)

"1943: Surrealism and Us"

originally published in French in Tropiques no. 8-9 (1943). Translated into English by Erin Gibson for Surrealist Women: An International Anthology (1998)

• Surrealism lives! And it is young, ardent, and revolutionary. In 1943 surrealism surely remains, as always, an activity whose aim is to explore and express systematically--and thus, neutralize--the forbidden zones of the human mind, an activity which desperately tries to give humankind the means of reducing the old antinomies, those "true alembics of suffering," and the only force enabling us to recover "this unique, original faculty, traces of which are retained by the primitive and the child, and which lifts the curse of the insurmountable barrier between inner and outer worlds."
  But surrealism, further proving its vitality, has evolved-or, rather, blossomed. When Breton created surrealism, the most urgent task was to free the mind from the shackles of absurd logic and of so-called reason. But in 1943, when freedom herself is threatened throughout the world, surrealism, which has never for one instant ceased to remain in the service of the largest and most thoroughgoing human emancipation, can now be summed up completely in one single, magic word: freedom.

• Such is surrealist activity, a total activity: the only one capable of liberating humankind by revealing the unconscious, an activity that will help free the peoples of the world as it illuminates the blind myths that have led them up till now...far from contradicting, diluting, or diverting our revolutionary attitude toward life, surrealism strengthens it. It nourishes an impatient strength within us, endlessly reinforcing the massive army of refusals.
  And I am also thinking of tomorrow.
  Millions of black hands will hoist their terror across the furious skies of world war. Freed from a long benumbing slumber, the most disinherited of all peoples will rise up from plains of ashes.
  Our surrealism will supply this rising people with a punch from its very depths. Our surrealism will enable us to finally transcend the sordid antinomies of the present: whites/Blacks, Europeans/Africans, civilized/savages-at last rediscovering the magic power of the mahoulis, drawn directly from living sources. Colonial idiocy will be purified in the welder's blue flame. We shall recover our value as metal, our cutting edge of steel, our unprecedented communions...
  Surrealism, tightrope of our hope.

Quotes about

• No important figure in the history of surrealism has been so overshadowed by a spouse as Suzanne Césaire, wife of poet/playwright Aimé Césaire. In view of her undeniably crucial role in the development of surrealism as well as of Négritude, it is astonishing how rarely she is mentioned in the voluminous critical literature on these movements.
  • Penelope Rosemont in Surrealist Women: An International Anthology (1998)

• surrealists had questioned technology, "progress," and the dominant Euro-American attitude toward nature long before 1940. However, it was this young Black woman, Suzanne Césaire, and her surrealist friends on a tiny island in the Caribbean during a time of imperialist world war who, more than anyone else, made these issues paramount concerns of surrealists everywhere. In Tropiques the need for radical change in the relations between humankind and nature was presented with special urgency, as an inseparable component of poetic activity and revolutionary struggle. Interestingly, the first appearance of the word ecology in a surrealist publication turns up in this journal.
  • Penelope Rosemont in Surrealist Women: An International Anthology (1998), p. 123