SOURCE: Ferguson, J. A. “‘Noirs Inconnus’: The Identity and Function of the Negro in Rimbaud's Poetry and Correspondence.” French Studies 39, no. 1 (January 1985): 43-58.

In the following essay, Ferguson studies references to Africans in Rimbaud's work, finding that the poet's attitudes toward Black people, slavery, and colonialism were ambivalent.

The publication in 1938 of Enid Starkie's Rimbaud en Abyssinie, an extended and revised translation of the earlier Arthur Rimbaud in Abyssinia, marked a new departure in the field of biographical mythmaking surrounding the life and career of the poet. Drawing upon previously unavailable correspondence and British Foreign Office documentation, Starkie was able to produce a detailed account of Rimbaud's activity and experience in Arabia and East Africa between 1880 and 1891 and, more controversially, to propose that during this period he had been actively involved in the slave-trade.¹ This allegation was founded on three sources of evidence: a Foreign Office report which...