Malik Noël-Ferdinand​

Faculté des Lettres et Sciences Humaines, CRILLASH, Université des Antilles

In December 1958, Aimé Césaire published “Mémorial de Louis Delgrès” for the first time. Standing as one of Césaire’s most prominent works, the poem recalls the story of the Guadeloupeans who fought against Bonaparte’s army in May 1802. The French Consul needed to end the colony’s “semiautonomous regime” (Dubois 319) and wanted to restore slavery that had been abolished in 1794. Led by Louis Delgrès, an experimented Martiniquan officer, the Guadeloupean freedom fighters were defeated. And as an ultimate maneuver, they chose to blow up themselves when the French troops step foot in their last refuge, a redoubt they had built on the upper hill of Morne Matouba. In singing Delgrès’s and his companions’ heroism, Aimé Césaire embraces the ancient traditions of epic poetry: he compares Delgrès to multiple mythological figures, and composes an architecture of phosphorescent melodies and unfathomable images. Accordingly, the poem epitomizes the writer’s desire of creating hallowed Caribbean roots. Indeed, Césaire not only describes the 1802’s epic battles but the poet also focuses on the crucial role of Guadeloupean natural landscape within the war. For it is ultimately through this landscape that Delgrès’s epic memory speaks to the contemporary Antilleans. Noël-Ferdinand’s talk will discuss how the epic form and ecopoetic texture of “Mémorial de Louis Delgrès” unveil Aimé Césaire’s poetical and ethical quests.