Christopher Winks and Carrie Noland debate Césaire’s perspective on poverty.
Response: Incurable Thirst: Six Theses for Aimé Césaire
“His use of cataclysmic imagery and coruscating invective links him not only with Surrealist revolt but with a deep Black diasporic tradition of the language of apocalypse, of a complete rupture with the institutional and psychic structures of oppression.“
Counter-response: “La misère d’une poésie”; a poetry of poverty
“I believe that what Césaire is really doing in the Cahier is trying to find a poetic language for poverty, a language crouched in the interstices of ideology, a language of particular apprehensions adequate to describing the experience of living in ‘mud and shit…’”
Rejoinder: “Making Diamonds out of Insults”
“Part of the Notebook‘s power lies precisely in its juxtaposition of, or oscillation between, poverty and plenitude .“