The Success and Failure of Picasso

               there is your face which turns upon the axle of your throat when you cry.…

Or, expressed more directly:

They demand of us: ‘Choose … choose between loyalty and with it backwardness, or progress and rupture.’ Our reply is that things are not so simple, that there isn’t an alternative. That life (I say life and not abstract thought) does not know and does not accept this alternative. Or rather that if this alternative presents itself, it is life that will take care of its transcendence.

Like Picasso, Césaire reaches across history. Like Picasso he would have confounded everybody before the twentieth century, because it would have seemed impossible then for a man to be in two ‘times’ at once: in the heart of Africa and at the centre of European literature. But, unlike Picasso’s, Césaire’s ‘reach’ is being constantly confirmed by events. He is part of a force that is changing the world before our eyes; whereas Picasso has become a law unto himself.

Here in the Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, Césaire imagines how it will be when he returns home:

I would find once more the secret of great speech and of great burning. I would say storm. I would say river. I would say tornado. I would say leaf, I would say tree. I would be soaked by each rain, moistened by every dew. As frenetic blood rolls upon the slow current of the eye, so I would roll words like maddened horses like new children like!clotted milk like curfew like traces of a temple like precious stones far enough away to daunt all miners. Who could not understand me would no more understand the roaring of the tiger.

Rise, phantoms, chemical-blue from a forest of hunted beasts of twisted machines of jujube-tree of rotten flesh of a basket of oysters of eyes of a lacework of lashes cut from the lovely sisal of a human skin I would have words huge enough to contain you all and you too stretched earth drunken earth

earth great sex raised at the sun

earth great delirium of God

earth risen wild from the sea’s locker with a bunch of cecrops in your mouth

earth whose surfing face I must compare to the mad and virgin forests that I would wish to wear as countenance before the undeciphering eyes of men.

one mouthful of your milk-spurt would let me discover always at the distance of a mirage an earth — a thousand times more native, golden with a sun no prism has sampled — a fraternal earth where all is free, my earth.

When Césaire arrives back in Martinique, he is disappointed. He finds an apathetic, demoralized, trivial colony:

Now I have come.

Once more this limping life before me, no not this life, this death, this death without sense or piety, this death where greatness pitifully fails, this death which limps from pettiness to pettiness; little greeds heaped on top of the conquistador; little flunkeys heaped on top of the great savage; little souls shovelled on top of the three-souled Caribbean.

Later he recovers from his disappointment, and pledges himself to his people, since it is only by such identification that the magic can be wrought, the magic of a ‘fraternal earth’.

               And here at the end of the small hours is my virile prayer

               that I may hear neither laughter nor crying, my eyes

               upon this city which I prophesy as beautiful.

               Give me the sorcerer’s savage faith

               give my hands the power to mould

               give my soul the temper of the sword,

               I will stand firm. Make of my head a prow

               and of myself make neither a father,

               nor a brother, nor a son,

               but the father, but the brother, but the son,

               nor make of me a husband, but the lover of this unique people.

I quote Césaire at such length because today it is hard for most Western European intellectuals to imagine the devotion which an artist may feel for his ‘unique people’. This devotion is the result of mutual dependence. The people need a spokesman — the fact that Césaire is a French Deputy is almost as important as his being a poet; the artist needs the clamour and hopes of those whom he represents.

For Picasso there has been no such ‘unique people’. He has exiled himself from Spain. He has seldom left France, and in France he has lived like an emperor in his own private court. Such facts would not necessarily count if he could still have identified himself in imagination with a ‘unique people’. But the unique people have been reduced to a unique person, who only half exists by virtue of his contrast with everybody else: the noble savage.

We must now return to the consequences of Picasso’s isolation as they have affected his art. He has not lacked appreciation. Nor has he lacked creativity. What he has lacked are subjects.

When it comes to it, there are very few subjects. Everybody repeats them. Venus and Cupid becomes the Virgin and Child, then a Mother and Child, but it’s always the same subject. To invent a new subject must be wonderful. Take Van Gogh. His potatoes — such an everyday thing. To have painted that — or his old boots! That was really something.