The Poetics of Being Mad and Black: (Psycho)analyzing the Évolué

“the insane awakening”

The Martinican poet, Aimé Fernand David Césaire, passed away on April 17, 2008. Coming eleven years after his death, I look at two works that solidified his literary reputation in the world: Notebook of a Return to The Native Land (“Cahier d'un retour au pays natal”) and Discourse on Colonialism (“Discours sur la colonialisme”). Aimé Césaire left a legacy in two separate, at times contradictory, fields: politics and literature. Because of this, scholars have long grappled with two Césaires, a literary Césaire and a political Césaire. Although the focus on Césaire's politics has produced fruitful and expansive scholarship, it unfortunately obscures how Césaire engaged with the relationship between psychoanalysis and aesthetics, particularly in his search for a way out of colonial trauma. Therefore, in this article, I move beyond traditional readings of Césaire's inner psychological and political strife to rethink Césaire's critique of psychoanalysis and current postcolonial thought more generally.

In order to do so, I look at Césaire's Discourse on Colonialism and his long poem Notebook of a Return to The Native Land along with the two text's conversation with one another and with other critical thinkers. The ultimate goal of the article is twofold: to explore Césaire's psychoanalysis and to engage with his poetics. In the first section, I investigate how, confronted with the fraught history of psychoanalysis’ intersections with colonial racism, Aimé Césaire dialogues with other anti-colonial thinkers, such as Suzanne Césaire and Frantz Fanon, about the methodology of psychoanalysis. In this section, I confront colonial archives, the psychology of imperial oppressions, and psychoanalysis’ complicity with imperialism. In the second section, I rework Césaire's legacy as president of Martinique and examine the relevance of his psychoanalysis to postcolonial studies, literary cr