SOURCE: "Aspects of Imagery and Symbolism in the Poetry of Aimé Césaire," in Yale French Studies, No. 53, 1976, pp. 175-96.

In the following essay, Okram examines the relationship between Césaire 's imagery and his West Indian heritage.

If Aimé Césaire's poetry is difficult to understand, as every student of his works is well aware, it appears to me that the difficulty comes principally from three basic factors. Briefly, these are Césaire's use of highly sophisticated vocabulary that bears witness to his solid literary education, his fixation for tortuous parataxic sentence structure and, what on the surface would appear to be, his cavalier penchant for discordant and disparate images and symbols as vehicles for poetic enunciation. The combination of these characteristics gives rise to poetry that is exceedingly personal in form and overtones despite the poet's avowed posture as the voice of the collective conscience of...