Discourse on Colonialism

Author
Aimé Césaire
Translator
Joan Pinkham
Publisher
Monthly Review Press
Year
1955, 2000
Collection
Liberation
Buy this book
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First published in 1950 and then revised five years later, Aimé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism is, in the words of Robin D. G. Kelley’s introduction, a “declaration of war.” In its compact, propulsive, and emphatic pages, Césaire draws explicit and visceral connections between colonialism in the so-called third world, and fascism in the first. In effect, he demonstrates that fascism is colonialism come home. In this edition, Kelley expounds on Césaire’s poetics, and notes that the root of the discourse’s power isn’t in the analysis but in the verve and force of the language—a force as powerful today as it was three quarters of a century ago.

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Reading notes

Boomerang

It has been instructive, this month as much as any other, to revisit Aimé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism, and especially his revelations about the straight line from colonialism to fascism. Written in the years just after the end of World War II, the book—really, a long prose poem—is not an abstract reckoning of fascism but a clear-eyed witness to it. To wit:

First we must study how colonization works to decivilize the colonizer, to brutalize him in the true sense of the word, to degrade him, to awaken him to buried instincts, to covetousness, violence, race hatred, and moral relativism; we must show that each time a head is cut off or an eye put out in Vietnam and in France they accept the fact, each time a Madagascan is tortured and in France they accept the fact, civilization acquires another dead weight, a universal regression takes place, a gangrene sets in, a center of infection begins to spread; and that at the end of all these treaties that have been violated, all these lies that have been propagated, all these punitive expeditions that have been tolerated, all these prisoners who have been tied up and “interrogated,” all these patriots who have been tortured, at the end of all the racial pride that has been encouraged, all the boastfulness that has been displayed, a poison has been distilled into the veins of Europe and, slowly but surely, the continent proceeds towards savagery.

And then one fine day the bourgeoisie is awakened by a terrific boomerang effect: the gestapos are busy, the prisons fill up, the torturers standing around the racks invent, refine, discuss.

Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, page 35

And:

What am I driving at? At this idea: no one colonizes innocently, that no one colonizes with impunity either; that a nation which colonizes, that a civilization which justifies colonization—and therefore force—is already a sick civilization, a civilization which is morally diseased, which irresistibly, progressing from one consequence to another, one denial to another, calls for its Hitler, I mean its punishment.

Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, page 39

And:

...colonization, I repeat, dehumanizes even the most civilized man; that colonial activity, colonial enterprise, colonial conquest, which is based on contempt for the native and justified by that contempt, inevitably tends to change him who undertakes it; that the colonizer, who in order to ease his conscience gets into the habit of seeing the other man as an animal, accustoms himself to treating him like an animal, and tends objectively to transform himself into an animal. It is this result, this boomerang effect of colonization, that I wanted to point out.