L’imaginaire de mon lieu … [naturally] dans le grand camouflage.
[Suzanne] Césaire in “Le grand camouflage” reads the Caribbean as interconnected space rather than as a series of discrete islands. Blurring both spatial and temporal boundaries, her authorial voice situates itself simultaneously in Haiti, Martinique, and Puerto Rico. “Le grand camouflage” is best characterized in Césaire’s own words as “le grand jeu de cache-cache,” a text that almost playfully weaves between veiling and revealing the geography, history, and social reality of race relations in the Antilles. Césaire deftly juggles the images of lucidity and what Keith Walker, in his introduction to the English translation of her collected works, describes as “the wilful blindness . . . the work it takes not to see.” It is in “Le grand camouflage” that Césaire finally fully takes on the role of the seer, that quality of the poet as voyant that she had until now only admired in others.
Beyond the Great Camouflage: Haiti in Suzanne Césaire’s Politics and Poetics of Liberation
Annette K. Joseph-Gabriel, Small Axe July 2016.
