SOURCE: "Link and Lance: Aspects of Poetic Function in Césaire's Cadastre—An Analysis of Five Poems," in L'Esprit Créateur, Vol. XXXIII, No. 1, spring 1992, pp. 54-68.

In the following essay, Hurley discusses five of Césaire's poems taking into account peculiarities of his French Caribbean heritage and its lack of literary tradition.

It would be difficult to examine the notion of poetic function in relation to Aimé Césaire without taking into consideration the tension and ambivalence of Césaire's situation as a black intellectual and as a poet, functioning within a profoundly alienating white French sociocultural context. On the one hand, as a black man, and particularly as a black Martinican-Frenchman, Césaire is constantly confronted by identity issues, grounded in the unhealed and perhaps unhealable wound of slavery, of colonization, and of relatively forced assimilation into an alien culture, as well as in potential isolation...