« Essentiel paysage » : l’herbier imaginaire d’Aimé Césaire

Abstract

Nature and landscapes are in the center of Aimé Césaire's work, which reinvested them with the values of post-colonialist society: the memory of slavery, the revolt against colonialism, real or dreamed Africa, essential nature.We will try to confront Césaire’s images and real landscapes and see that this poetry renown for his difficulty and darkness offers nevertheless a very concrete reading of the landscapes from Martinique. His metaphors throw us in the heart of the landscape, making us listen “crickets patching scrap” or to observe “the big black sabre of the royal poinciana”. Although places are rarely appointed, the attentive reader-wanderer can recognize them.The complexity of the botanical vocabulary has nothing free; the numerous evoked plants constitute an imaginary herbarium, which for every plant condenses in some words a symbolic value and a very precise naturalist observation. “The heliconia is tearing his heart” express the color, the complex organization and the swelling of the flower of the heliconia, associated to the historic wound of the black world. The darkness of the metaphor operates at the same time as tool of knowledge and mnemonic tool.Inviting us to decipher the infinite complexity of a real Nature and its correlations in an imagination anchored in the depths of a violent history, Césaire modifies irreversibly our perception of landscape.

Keywords

• landscape
• imaginary
• nature
• Césaire
• botany
• herbarium