[Racism] feels crazy. It is crazy. And it has just as much of a deleterious effect on white people and possibly equal as it does black people.
—Toni
Morrison, interview with Charie Rose (1993)
Originally written in 1950 before undergoing edits, Aimé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism is a fiery, uncensored engagement with the
history of colonialism and the cruel psyche of whiteness. It is easy, as I did,
to give it raucous applause for the way in which he does not hold back his
scathing commentary and cutting sarcasm; this applause is even necessary,
because of its truth. It is, however, also an incredibly sobering essay,
perhaps especially so after he reiterates that which many of us know
intimately: “colonisation = ‘thing-ification’” (1955: 6).
It could be argued that Césaire
demonstrates a peculiar obsession—for his knowledge is extensive— with the physical
and psychic violence carried out by European countries. Discourse is heavy with detail and specificity, including verbatim
quotes from writers, philosophers, Christian leaders, historians, psychologists
and scientists, and vivid descriptions that impart the horrors of colonialism
and the calculated logic and efficiency it took to propagate them. These
details in themselves are violent, but Césaire, in this brash manner,
inadvertently does some very important work. He centres the humanity of Black and
Brown people, surrounding it with this jarring narrative to emphasise the
violence in which Otherness was steeped before this period in which many
African countries were fighting for independence. He also carries out an
important temporal exercise: the “sadistic governors and greedy bankers” (1955:
11)—who will doubtlessly be carried over from one era to the next—are just as
evil and untrustworthy as the “venomous journalists [and] goitrous academicians”
(1955: 11) he must have encountered, and we most certainly encounter today.
What then, is he saying about the
school of thought he so vociferously engages with? Consider the very important
observation that Nazism only shocked the European imagination “because, until
then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples […]” (Césaire 1955: 3).
Not only is Césaire insistent on seeing the
humanity of those subjugated by colonialism, he is also insisting on a critical
distinction. Whereas Black and Brown people may only have access to the memory
of centuries of violent oppression, theirs is a history of violence. On the
other hand, Europe (and, he is careful to include, the United States of America)
is the actual history of violence—this
essay is very careful to separate the agency of violence from the intimate
experience of violence. In the way that Sartre traces the beginnings of anti-Semitism
to Europe, Césaire identifies colonialism and/or imperialism as the agent that aggressively
disrupted what was otherwise a history of communal, ante- and anti-capitalist,
democratic, cooperative and fraternal societies (1955: 7).
Césaire was not the first to make
this distinction, and neither has he been the last, which is relevant to the
temporal exercise mentioned above. Considering the tenacity with which Empire
holds onto the (its) foundational narrative that things today are not as bad as
they were ‘back then’, the Discourse
is an important reference point for freedom fighters and world builders, all of
whom operate within the framework of the [post-colonial/post-slavery] nation
today. Making significant use of Marxist theory throughout the essay, Césaire
states definitively “the nation is a
bourgeois phenomenon” (1955: 22). The colonial borders that the imperialists
left behind have only repeated the destruction that the Roman Empire did when
it “undertook to conquer and destroy [these] groups of nations” (Quinet in
Césaire 1955: 22); Césaire includes this information as if in foresight, and he
was not wrong. For this reason, we can draw another conclusion: Europe’s and
definitely the USA’s present—their
‘nowness’, so to speak—is that of violence.
When Charlie Rose asked Toni
Morrison how she feels about racism,
Morrison answers, “That is the wrong question. How do you feel?” She then takes white supremacy to task, asking, “What
are you without racism? Are you any good? Are you still strong? Still smart? Do
you like yourself?” By doing so, she recognises that if these
qualities—goodness, strength, smartness and self-love—are informed by a complex
historical hatred for the Other and an intense obsession with production and
prosperity, then the possessor of these qualities suffers from a “profound
neurosis that nobody examines for what it is.” This diagnosis, made in 1993, is
not unlike the one made by Césaire in the 1950s that “a nation which colonises,
[…] a civilisation which justifies colonisation—and therefore force—is already
a sick civilisation, a civilisation
that is morally diseased…” (1956: 4,
emphasis mine). This largely unchanged indictment offers a distillation of the
widely used word, ‘history’—in this case, then, to be the history of violence is to be history consisting of a violent
psyche, a violent moral code and a violent praxis. To say that this history has
survived thus far to become the above-mentioned ‘nowness’ of violence is to
recognise the persistence of a sickness so ingrained, Césaire has no
consideration even for those [gentlemen] of good faith and intentions (1955:
12). The psyche, morals and praxis of colonialism have brought us the bourgeois
state, so active on Empire’s globalised stage, we have today.
Discourse on Colonialism shoulders some very heavy labour, but it also casts horrific ridicule upon dominant European schools of thought. It is perhaps important, therefore, to think about how this ridicule is received by two main audiences: the oppressors and the oppressed. The former typically react with a righteous outrage, and sometimes even denial or whitewashed revisions of history; this is the sick psyche. The latter recognise and laugh, cathartically, at the sarcasm that translates gross acts of violence into stories that can be processed and cannot be forgotten, for the sake of the “new society that we must create” (Césaire 1955: 11) that includes, importantly, Black and Brown people’s history, which is a history of, among other things, “the fraternity of olden days” (1955: 11).
Works cited:
Césaire,
Aimé. Discourse on Colonialism. Editions
Presence Africaine, 1955.
Rose,
Charlie. Interview with Toni Morrison, 1993. [Available on Youtube].
