“of these optimists, the poet and scholar Fred Moten turns directly to Fanon’s writing on Césaire. In particular, Moten is interested in Fanon’s frustration with Césaire’s use of pidgin and words of his own coinage: “The new speech, which animates Césaire’s poetry as well as Fanon’s invocation of Césaire in the interest of disavowing the new speech, is where we discover, again and again, the various and unrecoverable natality that we share.” Connecting Fanon’s quarrel with Césaire to Hannah Arendt’s belief that all human activity, and especially political activity, carries the promise of new creation—a promise latent in the unrepeatable nature of each person’s birth, hence “natality”—Moten helps us to see the new dimensions that this debate has acquired over time. Césaire was self-consciously preoccupied with making something new in art and politics alike, but reading his poetry today (with a stronger sense of the historical specificity of his writing) provides the present with the kind of historical investigation of blackness that Fanon felt was unavailable. But more important, the fact that Césaire did so through the materiality of language indicates blackness’s power for a new “communicability” not rooted in an essentialized idea of race, but in new methods of critiquing the cultural machinery that essentializes. For Césaire, new words hold the promise of new worlds. Poetry isn’t the only expressive mode where this kind of language work can happen, but it still is the best.
[…]Davis’s Journal (Journal of a Homecoming … a new translation appeared from N. Gregson Davis, a professor of ancient Greek and Latin poetry at Duke University who grew up in Antigua.) provides the most powerful articulation of Césaire’s “new speech,” along with the necessary contextualizing tools to recognize and appreciate this power. In doing so, Davis has not merely translated a great work of modernist poetry and an essential document in postcolonial history; he has created a present-day source of timely dissent.”
— (The New Worlds of Aimé Césaire by David B. Hobbs, The Nation, July 3, 2018)
