SOURCE: "Gender, Genre and Geography in Aimé Césaire's Cahier d'un retour au pays natal" in Callaloo, Vol. 18, No. 2, 1995, pp. 492-505.

In the following essay, Kalikoff delineates the gender construction of the poem and challenges its reputation as "epic " and "heroic."

Aimé Césaire's Cahier d'un retour au pays natal is one of the acknowledged master-pieces of francophone Caribbean literature. A great work seems to require a great man, a hero who can act and speak for an entire people, and indeed the period Cahier inhabits in Caribbean literary history has been referred to as an era of "Heroic Negritude" (Arnold). There is scarcely any scholarship on the long poem which does not refer to it as "epic" and "heroic." What I would like to argue, however, is that these terms are inappropriate, for two reasons.¹ First, they function to smooth out the disruptive quality of the poem...