Anténor Firmin, Aimé and Suzanne Césaire: In Search of

Africa and Ourselves

Keith Louis Walker

L'Esprit Créateur, Volume 56, Number 1, Spring 2016, pp. 129-144 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/613864

Access provided by UFRJ-Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (8 Jan 2019 13:02 GMT)
 Anténor Firmin, Aimé and Suzanne Césaire:
In Search of Africa and Ourselves
Keith Louis Walker

I
N 2009, THE CITY OF PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti, established the Aimé
Césaire University Institute, housing at its center the Anténor Firmin
Amphitheater. Honoring these two in the midst of the Haitian capital
symbolizes Haiti’s outreach to Martinique, the rest of the Caribbean, the
world, and the universal. The architectural metaphor itself asserts a Caribbean
genealogy and monumentalizes the immanent, substantive, and resonant place
of Anténor Firmin’s revolutionary formulation of the natural equality of the
human races in the subsequent work of Aimé Césaire, whose name is synony-
mous with the revolutionary affirmation of black humanity that is Négritude.
In 1998, invited to a special colloquium in Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe, in
commemoration of the one hundred fiftieth anniversary of the 1848 abolition
of slavery in France and its French colonies, I delivered a paper
entitled “Réponse à un acte d’accusation: De l’égalité des races humaines
(1885) par Anténor Firmin (Haïti).” In 1999–2000 when few of us were work-
ing on Firmin, I established a Firmin-Aimé Césaire genealogy.1 In the present
article, I deepen that connection by looking closely not only at a genealogy of
thinking but also at remarkable similarities in articulation, thus illustrating
textually the architectural amphitheater metaphor, indicated above, of a reso-
nant echoing relationship between Firmin and Aimé Césaire. I further incor-
porate the thought of Suzanne Césaire2 to complete the ontological
“Ethiopian-Africa” nexus present in both Firmin and Aimé Césaire. Beyond
alluding to a shared sense of the elusive concept of Négritude, the present arti-
cle seeks to perform substantive close readings of Firmin-Césaire texts side
by side. This article attempts to bring the force of Firmin’s thought into
the twenty-first century by establishing a spatial diaspora genealogy.

Situations
The connections, parallels or intellectual echoes between Anténor Firmin’s
nineteenth-century and Aimé Césaire’s twentieth-century projects and writing
are striking and at times forcefully poetic. Challenging the idea of the non-
homogeneity of the human species, both writers in their respective times
penned humanistic apologies in defense of the denigrated black race. The
research and concepts presented in Firmin’s 1885 essay On the Equality of the
Human Races offered crucial portals for the imagination of the Négritude

© L’Esprit Créateur, Vol. 56, No. 1 (2016), pp. 129–144

 L’ESPRIT CRÉATEUR

intellectuals, artists, and poets of the 1930’s and 40’s, and a powerful counter
to the ‘blind myths’ of the European colonialist invention of the Black and
Africa as barbarous and lacking in technology, culture, and civilization.
Firmin’s counter-argument emerges from what is obvious to him: “that the
very presence of this doctrine [the inequality of the human races] contami-
nates any branch of human knowledge with contradiction and illogic, which
infallibly leads the best minds and the most enlightened intellects to embrace
the most absurd or monstrous ideas.”3

Chronologies and issues

Fifty-six years after the 1789 French uprising against the aristocracy of the
skin, and seven years after the 1848 abolition of slavery in the French
colonies, in 1855 Paris, Joseph Arthur, Comte de Gobineau, published his
Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines (Essay on the Inequality of the
Human Races). Firmin points out that many Haitians were unaware that in his
essay Gobineau gave pointed and extended attention to the case of Haiti in the
wake of the Haitian Revolution. Firmin felt that however “slanderous, harsh
or denigrating” the remarks about Haiti, Haitians, Negroes, and black writers
and thinkers were, the comments were exemplary of their type, and thus
should be read and lessons drawn from them.

The history of Haiti, of democratic Haiti, is but a long account of massacres: massacres of mulat-
toes by Negroes, when the latter have the upper hand; massacres of Negroes by mulattoes, when
power is in their hands. The country’s institutions, however philanthropic they proclaim to be, are
powerless; they remain dormant on the piece of paper upon which they were written. What is
unleashed is the true mindset of the entire population. Consistent with the natural law evoked ear-
lier, the black writer who belongs to those human tribes incapable of civilization harbors the most
deep-seated hatred for all other races; moreover, one witnesses the Negroes of Haiti energetically
rejecting whites and forbidding them entry to their territory; they would even like to exclude the
mulattoes, whom they aim to exterminate.4

Countering Gobineau’s depiction of Haitian barbarism, Firmin analyzes what

he considers to be the prompt evolution of the black in the New World from
slavery to independence, privileging the case of Haiti and the example of its
intellectuals, military figures, and heroes of its independence movement.
Firmin asserts:

We shall see what in the lofty regions of the mind has been accomplished by the great-grandchil-
dren of those dragged from the Gold Coast, from Dahomey, from the land of the Arada, the
Mandingo, the Ibo, and the Congo peoples, to be cast down into Haiti covered in chains and curs-
ing their fate.5

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 KEITH LOUIS WALKER

Gobineau’s essay was not only an a posteriori ‘scientific’ justification of slav-

ery, but also an a priori justification of modernity’s continuation of colonialist
practices of exploitation based on the aristocracy of the skin. In the post-slav-
ery period, colonialist practices took the form of oppressive debt systems and
the forced labor, servitude, and indenture of Africans, Amerindians,
Caribbeans, and Asians. The Haitian-born Firmin wrote his essay as a response
to, as well as a denunciation of, the physical, medical, intellectual, and moral
anthropology of the period, a discourse considered inimical, or in his terms
“iniquitous.” Throughout De l’égalité, Firmin qualifies the scientific claims of
the times that asserted the differences between black and white humanity as
“specious,” “suspect,” “perverse,” “monstrous,” “stupid,” “fanciful,” and ulti-
mately “bias pompously masquerading as science.” Firmin was addressing not
only the rhetoric of Gobineau but also that of others, including Ernest Renan
whom Firmin quotes as stating in Dialogues philosophiques (Philosophical
Dialogues) (1876), “Men are not equal. The Negro, for example, is made to
serve the great things conceived and desired by the White man” (Égalité 480).
Firmin’s monumental inquiry was published in 1885, the year of the death
of Victor Hugo, the great poetic genius he admired for writing “Tous les
hommes sont l’homme” (Man is every man)” (Equality, AC 443). Echoing
Hugo and Firmin, Aimé Césaire wrote some sixty years later, “the world does
not spare me. There is not one single lynched man in the world, not one tor-
tured man in whom a part of myself is not murdered and humiliated.”6
Firmin’s sense of the oneness of human life containing the multiple expresses
the sympathetic humanistic phenomenon of simultaneity and unanimism. He
cites Maspero: “God is one but has a multiplicity of arms” (Equality, AC 234).
Driving Firmin’s inquiry is the fundamental notion that history, science, and
anthropology should be capable of embracing simultaneous, multiform
human experience at different points in space, just as through one’s ancestry
the individual is the sum of all past times.

The year 1885 was also a time of assessment and re-assessment on the eve
of the 1889 centennial of the French Revolution, whose watchwords liberty,
fraternity, and especially equality had obvious resonance for Firmin, accord-
ing to whom:

The voice of France crossed mountains and oceans to be heard all around the world. But I fear it
must be said that this notion of universal brotherhood has remained a mere joke for most civilized
nations. The idea is still part of current thinking only because it is convenient. The problem is that
logically one cannot conceive of brotherhood without equality. Such a notion would fly in the
face of every notion of philosophy and modern law. Proven by science and confirmed by increas-

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ingly numerous and eloquent, and indispensable facts, the principle of the equality of the races is
the true basis of human solidarity. (Equality, AC 448)

With Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (Notebook of a Return to the Native
Land) and seven issues of Tropiques, Aimé and Suzanne Césaire began writing
at the moment of historical transition that was the period between 1939 and
1945 when the Gobineau-inspired Hitlerist-Vichy discourse of the inequality
of the human races had precipitated and contributed to World War II. In post-
war 1950, Césaire, in his Discourse on Colonialism, denounced “the big lie”
of the European civilizing mission, “the big lie” of anthropological hypocrisy,
and “the big lie” of the dishonest equations that Christianity equals civilization
and that black culture equals savagery and paganism. Firmin had asserted that
the work of Gobineau and others was in no way “a scientific response, it is a
pure game of rhetoric to be reduced to its just value” (Égalité, AC 227).
Thus, Firmin’s goal was also to denounce the moral, intellectual, and sci-
entific relativism of Europe: first, through a systematic refutation of the false
ethnography of slavery and post-slavery racism; and second, through a
grandiose affirmation, with examples, of the humanity and genius of Blacks.
According to Firmin, one must “destroy the claims flaunted by the White race
to a monopoly on intelligence and all superior aptitudes” (Égalité, AC 452).
In Firmin’s phrasing, one discerns the beginning utterances of Aimé Césaire’s
assertion in the 1939 Notebook: “And no race possesses the monopoly of
beauty, intelligence, strength [...] and there is space for everyone at the
rendez-vous of victory.”7 Firmin was quite specific in discussing each element
(beauty, intelligence, and strength).

If it is possible to identify unquestionable types of beauty among Blacks and types of absolute
ugliness among Whites (Aesop’s and Socrates’ highly irregular features and yet a highly devel-
oped intellect), how can we pretend to be able to establish a racial hierarchy based on some cri-
terion of formal beauty which presumably varies among the races? (Equality, AC 184)

Further, on the ways human beings defy the categories and myths of racial
hierarchies, Firmin asserts that beauty does not belong to one particular race,
and he contends that all ethnologists know deep inside that the Ethiopians are
black and their phenotype is no less beautiful than that of Caucasians. On
intelligence, Firmin queries:

We can already ask the question. Have scholars studied the science of the mind, noology, in suf-
ficient depth to be able to classify methodically the different manifestations of intelligence and
rank them methodically with any certainty? Where will we find the rules for such a classification?
(Equality, AC 166)

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 KEITH LOUIS WALKER

Concerning the strength of the different races, Firmin speaks of aptitudes and
concludes that strengths or aptitudes are variable, relative, and dynamic: “The
world does not stand still. Nations and races interact on the stage of history,
exit and return in different roles” (Equality, AC 653). The ebb and flow of the
prestige or status of certain nations leads Firmin to one of his insights on the
natural equality of the races:

This equality is upset only when one particular race benefits from favorable evolutionary circum-
stances to achieve a level of development and acquire certain aptitudes not yet attained by others.
But lest we forget those now on the heights of power and prestige […]. We observe, to the con-
trary, that most of those nations formerly considered hopelessly backward now occupy a pre-emi-
nent position, whereas others that enjoyed enormous power in the sixteenth and seventeenth cen-
turies have lost all their former status. (Equality, AC 652)

Moreover, according to Firmin, moderation and excess, virtues and vices, are
equally shared among all races, classes, and, one might argue, without gender
distinction. Later, Césaire will make no gender distinction concerning the
virtues or vices of men and women: “I have no illusions either about men or
about women. I have sufficient insight to know them and to understand them.
All oppressions resemble one another. All oppressions are kindred.”8 Firmin
ends his essay with a cornerstone of universal Cartesian humanism:

Humans everywhere are endowed with the same qualities and the same defects without distinc-
tion of color or anatomical shape. The races are equal; they are all capable of rising to the noblest
of virtues, of reaching the highest intellectual development; as they are equally capable of falling
into a state of total degeneration. (Equality, AC 662)

The case of Ethiopia and the Ethiopian sentiment of life

Firmin defined anthropology as a complex study from the cosmological, bio-
logical, sociological, philosophical as well as linguistic perspective of “Man
in his physical, intellectual and moral dimensions, as he is found among the
different races which constitute the human species” (Equality, AC 10).
Firmin’s anthropology is not an anti-racist racist anthropology. In other words,
while vigorously countering the claim of Eurocentric racial superiority based
on false science, he avoids an Afro-centric trap of a reverse glorification of the
superiority of blacks at the expense of recognizing other civilizations. If the
Greeks themselves considered the Nile was the cradle of the humanity, even
though the earliest inhabitants of that region were of the ancient Ethiopian-
Egyptian race, in other words, members of the black race, Firmin feels it is
logical to conclude that “The Black race has preceded all other races in the
construction of civilization […] The Greeks paid homage to the ancient

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Ethiopian-Egyptians, the Romans paid homage to the Greeks, so let the whole
of Europe salute them all” (Equality, AC 252). In addition to Gobineau and
Ernest Renan, without naming them directly Firmin is addressing Gustave
d’Eichtal and Ismaÿl Urbain and the gendered late Medieval-early Renais-
sance spirit/flesh dichotomies upon which the nineteenth-century racialist
hierarchies were based. According to these thinkers, the Saint-Domingue
Revolution had turned everything epistemologically upside down. Before
Gobineau advanced his theory of miscegenation as the principal cause of the
decline of Western civilization, these two Saint-Simonians were imagining on
the contrary the symbolic coupling of the continents, and even more, the
hybridity of cultures as the future “make-up” of the human family which
would most certainly be racially mixed. The era of single destinies was over.
Finally, one cannot overlook the fact that Urbain was a mulatto from
French Guyana who converted to Islam and who may be considered as the
precursor of a poetic expression of Négritude.9 In their Lettres sur la race
noire (Letters on the Black Race) (1839), D’Eichtal and Urbain represent the
world henceforth as naturally hybrid:

The black appears to me to be the female race in the human family just as the white is the male
race. Just as women, the black is deprived of political and scientific faculties: he has never
founded a great state. He is not an astronomer, mathematician or naturalist; he has done nothing
in industrial mechanics. However, in contrast he possesses to the highest degree qualities of the
heart, affection and domestic feelings; he is a man of interiors. Like the woman, he likes trinkets
for self-adornment, dance, song. Up to this point domesticity and servitude have been more or
less identical concepts. Also, the black, an essentially domestic being, is like the woman. One can
also say, in another way, that the standard couple is composed of a white man and a black
woman.10

Concerning the Ethiopian and gender, one paragraph in Firmin is of particular

interest from several perspectives: first, its socio-politico moral allocation of
gender to the Ethiopian as the sum not of Man, that Renaisssance optimal
expression of the Prosperian homo hierarchicus economicus, but of the human;
and second, a slippage or conceptual drift in which the Ethiopian stands in for
the modern, transnational, and trans-historical category of the Black :

The enlightenment of education will help the Ethiopian to read into the past. The wisdom of phi-
losophy will enable him to sort out facts and to weigh past and current suggestions every time he
has to pass judgment or adopt a rule of conduct. Instead of harboring hatred in his heart, he will
generously spread the inexhaustible love of which he is naturally endowed, such that those who
do not know the rich and varied qualities of his temperament (ineffable kindness and virile
courage), will see him as feminine even in his display of his most masculine behavior. (Equality,
AC 657)

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 KEITH LOUIS WALKER

The slippage or conceptual drift in which Ethiopian stands in for the modern,
transnational man and trans-historical category of the Black, and the educated
mind reading into the past, allow a transition to Césaire and a concluding con-
nection between Firmin’s project and Césairian Négritude.
In 2000 Césaire commented:

Up until this point, we are still in négritude.

We have been in négritude for a long time. […] It is the re-appropriation of ourselves by
ourselves.
Assimilation, that is the enemy. Alienation, that is the enemy.
Consequently, one must re-become, retake possession of one’s welfare, of one’s values. […]
It goes back to the birth of humanity.
It takes us back to the banks of the Niger.
It takes us into Ethiopia.
It takes us back to the birth of Humankind.
It’s that, this extension through time and projection into eternity,
it’s that that is négritude.
(Césaire, ABCésaire 56–59)

Defining Négritude in its goals and function as a project and discourse,

Césaire can be said also to have rearticulated the goals and discursive maneu-
vers of Firmin’s On the Equality of the Human Races. Perhaps Césaire’s sub-
versive rhetoric is more explicit:

Négritude, a necessary revolt against the European feeling of superiority.

Négritude is the result of an active attitude of the mind on the offense:
It is a summersault, a summersault of dignity.
It is a refusal, and I mean a refusal of oppression.
It is a struggle, that is to say, a struggle against inequality.
It is also a revolt. But a revolt against what?—I hear you ask. I am not forgetting that I am here
at a cultural conference, here in Miami, that I choose to say this. I think one can generally say
that, historically, Négritude has been a form of revolt, mainly against the global cultural system
as it had been constituted during the last several centuries, a system characterized by a certain
number of prejudices, of assumptions which generate a very strict hierarchy. In other words,
Négritude has been a revolt against what I shall call European reductionism.
I am referring to the system of thought, or rather the instinctive tendency of an eminent and pres-
tigious civilization reducing the concept of universality to its own dimensions; in other words,
through its own categories. […] And in the process, after a long period of frustration, we, our-
selves, were able to seize our own past and, through poetry, through our imagination, through
novels, through works of art, perceive the intermittent flashes of our own possible future.11

For both Firmin and Césaire, the originary moment at the Ethiopian-Egyptian
dawn of civilization is a critical time of cosmological, cosmogonic pure dis-
covery. Firmin queries fervently: “Will the Black race someday play a promi-

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nent role in World history, taking up once again the torch it held to light up
the way on the shores of the Nile for the whole of humanity during those first
wailings at the Ethiopian-Egyptian dawn of civilization?” (Equality, AC 653)
In Poésie et connaissance (Poetry and Knowledge) (1945), Césaire seems to
tease out Firmin’s evocation of the moment of those first wailings of pre-sci-
entific discovery at the Ethiopian-Egyptian dawn of civilization:

And here we are taken back to the first days of humanity. It is an error to believe that knowledge,
to be born, had to await the methodical exercise of thought or the scruples of experimentation. I
even believe that humankind has never been closer to certain truths than in the first days of the
species. At the time when humankind discovered with emotion the first sun, the first rain, the first
breath, the first moon. At the time when humankind discovered in fear and rapture the throbbing
awareness of the world.
Attraction and terror. Trembling and wonderment. Strangeness and intimacy. Only the sacred
phenomenon of love can still give us an idea of what that solemn moment can have been.
It is in this state of fear and love, in this climate of emotion and imagination, that humankind
made its first, most fundamental, most decisive discoveries.12

Historically, traditionally, and imaginatively, Ethiopia was almost synony-

mous with continental Africa. The work of Firmin and the Césaires was an
intervention into the construction of a discourse of Ethiopian-ness, that is, the
status of what we have called Ethiopia, Ethiopians, and Africa. Both Firmin
and Césaire worked towards what Césaire described repeatedly as

the rehabilitation of our values by our own selves, of the deepening of our past by our selves, of
a re-rooting of our selves in a history, a geography, a culture, all interpreted not as a backward-
looking accent on the past, but as a reactivation of the past in order to overtake it. (Césaire, Dis-
cours sur la Négritude [Discourse on Négritude], 85; my translation)

The passage recalls De la réhabilitation de la race noire par la République

d’Haïti (1900), authored by Hannibal Price, from whom the Haitian anthro-
pologist Dr. Jean Price-Mars took his name. In her Tropiques essay The
Malaise of a Civilization, Suzanne Césaire attempts to bridge the gap between
the Caribbean self, the African past, and in so doing queries and re-affirms the
vegetal and the Ethiopian sentiment of life:

What is the Martinican fundamentally, intimately, unilaterally? And how does he live? […] the
Martinican is typically Ethiopian. In the depths of his consciousness he is the plant-human and
while identifying oneself with the plant, the desire is to abandon oneself to the rhythm of life. In
providing answers to these questions, we shall see a stunning contradiction appear between the
deep self, with its desires, its impulses, its unconscious forces—and life lived with its necessities,
its urgencies, its gravity. A phenomenon of decisive importance for the future of this country.

136 SPRING 2016

 KEITH LOUIS WALKER

What is the Martinican?

—A plant-human. […]
Like a plant, he abandons himself to the rhythm of universal life. There is not the slightest
effort to dominate nature. Mediocre farmer. Perhaps. I am not saying that he makes the plant
grow: I am saying that he grows, he lives in a plant-like manner. His indolence? that of the veg-
etal. Do not say “he is lazy,” say “he vegetates.” And you will speak in truth for two reasons. His
favorite phrase: “Let it go.” By that, understand that he lets himself be carried along by life,
docile, light, un-insistent, non-rebellious—in a friendly way, lovingly. Obstinate moreover as
only a plant can be. Independent (independence, autonomy of the plant). Surrender to self, to the
seasons, to the moon, to the more or less long day. Fruit harvest. And always and everywhere in
the slightest manifestations, the primacy of the plant, the plant trampled underfoot but still alive,
dead but reviving, the plant free, silent and proud.
Open your eyes—A child is born. To which god should it be entrusted? To the Tree god.
Coconut tree or Banana tree, among whose roots the placenta is buried.
Open your ears. According to popular Martinican folklore the grass that grows on a grave is
the living hair of the dead female buried beneath, who is protesting against death. The symbol is
always the same: a plant. It is a vital feeling of a life-death community. In short it is the Ethiopian
sentiment of life13.

Suzanne Césaire’s evocation of the Ethiopian sentiment of life recalls

Firmin’s assessment of the Haitian black males’ Ethiopian élan or vital
impulse:

Lithe and strong, they have well-toned muscles and a marvelous physical agility. Add to these
traits a pleasant face with well-etched and harmonious features and that youthfully proud expres-
sion which springs from the Ethiopian sense of being free, independent and equal to everyone
else, and one will have a clear idea of these men whose forefathers showed such heroism that his-
tory will always remember. (Equality, AC 197)

The colonial library and persistent questions

Anténor Firmin’s work reminds us that colonialism was not only the power to
control territories, commercial routes, and resources for the enrichment of the
European center, but also, hand in glove with anthropology, colonialism was
the power that would define the racial Other and disseminate a self-serving
knowledge. On the Equality of the Human Races was a history-making
counter-intervention of anthropology not in complicity with colonialism and
Eurocentric thought, but rather as an example of resistance to the cathected
complexity of power, authority, and what constitutes knowledge and truth.
Some might relegate On the Equality of the Human Races to the “colonial
library,” that is, until one reflects upon contemporary research and the persist-
ence of misrepresentations of peoples and cultures of color, particularly neo-
liberal-techno-NGO depictions and engagements of the disenfranchised in the
new global economy. Andrew Apter demonstrates forcefully that the grand nar-

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ratives, tribal tropes, distorted images, and ‘natural’ histories that forged the
foundations of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century discourse about Africa
remain firmly entrenched and have not transcended the politics of Africa’s
imperial past.14 Concerning Ethiopia specifically, according to Ayele Bekerie,
the problem of Ethiopian origins remains a thorny question for historiogra-
phers.15 Bekerie asserts that almost all history texts begin from the premises
that the history and civilization of Ethiopia have had an external origin—as it
was confronted by Firmin. A history of Ethiopia is mostly a history of northern
Ethiopia and its links to the Arabian Peninsula. This is because historical nar-
ratives have been shaped by external paradigms. Furthermore, according to
Bekerie, it is posited that the history of the Ethiopian people begins with the
arrival and settlements of the ‘culturally superior’ people of “South Arabian or
the South Semitic origin [as the genitors] of the major part of the Ethiopian civ-
ilization and culture, including its writing system, its religion, its languages,
agricultural practices and dynasties.” For Bekerie, the questions remain: What
are these external paradigms? Who are their authors? Why did they remain so
prevalent in our construction of Ethiopian history? What prevents historiogra-
phers from pursuing an Ethiopia-centered (people-centered) interpretation and
construction of Ethiopian history?
Both the fundamental hypothesis of equality of all races and the con-
sciousness-raising concept of Négritude constituted intellectual and scientific
reversals, liberatory conceptual “summersaults,” and a revolt against Euro-
pean reductionism in the representation of Africa and Blacks. In the Discourse
on Colonialism (1950), Césaire highlights the complicity of science in the
process of European reductionism. With incomparable denunciatory elo-
quence, Firmin analyzed the calculating brutality of the project of the epider-
misation of inferiority, social ostracism, and the absolute ontological negation
of the humanity of Blackness:

Those Europeans who have the audacity to reproach the black slave for his intellectual inferiority
do not therefore recall having employed every ingenious device in order to prevent intelligence from
ever developing in him. After having broken all the resilience of his willpower, every bit of his
moral energy, all elasticity of the mind, leaving only a brute there where a human being threatened
to affirm itself, did they not know, without a shadow of a doubt, that there remained nothing more
of the lofty in this methodically degraded being? It is, however, in addressing that being, taking him
as the basis of comparison that they have established the bases of judgment by which they declare
that the races are not equal, that the Negroes are at the bottom of the ladder and the Caucasians are
at the top. A science that erects itself in the middle of such a reversal of nature and that searches
therein its rules of appraisal and reasoning can offer nothing serious, nothing solid. In this painful
instance, science, by a cowardly connivance or a lack of observation has made itself complicitous
with the most stupid of prejudices and the most iniquitous of systems. (Égalité 488–89)

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Four rivers and a flow of black history: From the Nile to the Artibonite,
the Mississippi to the Potomac
Firmin’s essay is characterized by idealism, utopianism, and Afro-optimism,
all grounded in a commitment to hard work and a dogged persistence. In sev-
eral chapters such as “Darwinism and Equality,” “The Role of the Black Race
in the History of Civilization,” “The Intellectual Evolution of the Black Race
in Haiti,” and “The Rapidity of Evolution in the Black Race,” Firmin contem-
plates what he designates as the demonstrated and prompt perfectibility of
Blacks from the dawn of Ethiopian-Egyptian civilization on the banks of the
Nile, through European capture, Atlantic trade and enslavement, to the slave
rebellions in Saint-Domingue and the ensuing 1804 establishment of the first
black republic in the New World on the banks of the Artibonite River.
The supreme leader of the Saint-Domingue Revolution, Toussaint Louver-
ture (c.1743–1803), is presented by Firmin in terms that unpack his well-
known 1802 depiction straddling a rearing horse in the engraving entitled
“Toussaint Louverture, Chef des noirs insurgés de Saint-Domingue, à Paris
chez Jean, rue Jean de Beauvais, no. 10.” According to Firmin, Wendell
Phillips, a U.S. human rights advocate and friend of Abraham Lincoln, offered
an apt profile of François Dominique Breda Louverture as leader of the slave
masses depicted as less than human:
What has he achieved? says Phillips. He has driven the Spaniards back into their territories,
attacked and vanquished them there, and flown the French banner over every Spanish fort in
Saint-Domingue. For perhaps the first time the Island obeys under one law. He has the mulattoes
under his yoke. He has attacked Maitland, defeated him in pitched battles and allowed him to
retreat to Jamaica, and when the French Army rose up against its general Laveaux and had him
put in chains, Toussaint defeated them, had Laveaux released from prison and put him at the head
of his own troops. The grateful French in return named him General-in-Chief, and someone
declared, “Cet homme fait L’OUVERTURE partout” This man can make an OPENING any-
where” [my emphasis]. Hence the name L’Ouverture given him by his soldiers. (Égalité, 553)

Toussaint was popularly known as the “Centaur of the Savannahs.”16 In

reading the 1802 engraving alongside Firmin 1885 and James 1938, the idea
emerges that history and the Enlightenment Revolutionary Toussaint march
forward ambiguously, ambivalently, Janus-headed, looking backward and for-
ward, rising and falling, reactionary and liberal. Like the Centaur, the revolu-
tionary is uplifted by humanistic and ravishing utopian visions of rationally
socially engineered imagined communities. Simultaneously, like the Centaur,
the revolutionary is weighted down in this world to the earth, in the dirt, mud,
and stench of the reality of the bestial violence of the colonial world. Strad-
dling two centuries, two epochs dominated by the elevation of European man

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and the degradation of the racial Other, Louverture is figured as a man not
only of openings but also of endings. At the crossroads of eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century history, caught between shadows and dawnings, a figure
of transition, brandishing an avenging and path-breaking machete-sword, à
cheval, on horseback, Toussaint is a rebel in Spanish Royalist uniform. Tous-
saint is straddling myriad fault-lines during a period of extraordinary epis-
temic shift from the bloody insurrection and decolonization of Saint-
Domingue to the Independence of Haiti. Visionary and reactionary, Toussaint
straddles his own ambiguous socio-political agenda based on the Declaration
of the Rights of Man and the Citizen coupled with his post-slavery, military,
almost forced labor managerial program for the survival, welfare, and transi-
tion of the fledgling Republic. He straddled an isolationist politics of inde-
pendence first from England on August 31, 1798, and then freeing the slaves
from Spain in 1801, yet proposing subsequently not independence from
France but rather a Commonwealth and internationalist relationship. Spiritu-
ally Toussaint straddled Christian faith and Vodou practice, espousing martyr-
dom, identifying with Saint John the Baptist and Christ on the one hand, and
with Papa Ogoun-Ferraille, the loa of iron and war willing to die for his
people, on the other. Like Firmin, Aimé Césaire finds inspiration in Tous-
saint’s stunning emergence from slavery and remarkable evolution:

A leader had been born to the Black people of Saint-Domingue: a revolutionary leader, that is to
say, a man wedded to the masses, discovering his potential and new dimensions gradually as new
events invested him with new responsibilities; a thinker, a man of deeds, a diplomat, an adminis-
trator all these qualities affirming themselves as they were required of him—all of that was Tou-
ssaint Louverture and it makes one shudder to think that his genius, unknown and unrecognized,
could have withered away in the bonds of slavery.17

In chapter 15 of The Rapid Evolution of the Black Race, Firmin discusses

many of the decisive events of the Saint-Domingue Revolution such as the
battles of Crête-à-Pierrot and Vertières, as well as the arrest of Toussaint Lou-
verture that took place on the banks of Haiti’s principal waterway, the Arti-
bonite River. Firmin treats “the major actors of Haitian independence,” espe-
cially the two other great generals Jean-Jacques Dessalines and Henri
Christophe, as will Césaire in The Tragedy of King Christophe. In this play,
Césaire includes an apostrophe to the vast, winding, fabled, and historic “Papa
Fleuve” or “Daddy River,” as King Christophe designates the Artibonite.

The Presenter
Can one keep a country from crying out? From the Môle Saint-Nicolas in the north, to Jérémie
in the south.

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 KEITH LOUIS WALKER

Haiti is a gaping mouth and the tongue of Haiti, the corridor that comes from afar, to the middle
of high lands, to its deepest gorge where its most intimate speech and most secret lifeblood
comingle, fabling the inextinguishable name: Artibonite.
And if I return (Honor! Respect) it is to speak to you of the Artibonite River, the Daddy of all
Haitian rivers, the papa-fleuve as King Christophe says.
The helpful compadre! How generously it creates gullies, channels, troughs and lagoons, some-
thing to help everyone. And it ferries, like no other, that vigorous one!
Fragments of epic tales, of gods, of goddesses, of sirens, the hope and despair of a people, the
anguish of the altiplano and the savannahs, the violence and the tenderness of a people, The Art-
ibonite River, in its capricious and fantastic outpouring, from one switchback whirlpool to the
next, carries, transports, empties and releases everything from the high mountains of Dominicanie
to—and there is no point attempting to find it on a map—it’s called Grande Saline…
And it ferries also depending on the season enormous tree trunks lashed together on rafts: it is log-
wood skated along on the river way and cured by its silt. Fifty square meters in surface, weighing
ten tons, all of it floating half submerged on a bamboo frame and banana tree trunk floats, these
kontikis are not easy to steer. Also not comfortable, the galley for those who dare board them, men
known as “radayeurs,” river loggers. No sail. No rudder. So, inevitably, leaning heavily into their
tall mango wood perches, they have the time to sing, to tell stories and to philosophize.18

In its turbulent and epic history, in its ferrying of merchandise in the colo-
nial economy and its logging tradition, the Artibonite bears a remarkable
resemblance to the Mississippi. A study of the lived experience of the princi-
pal actors of the Haitian Revolution and the Second Republic in the New
World as well as the metrics of his socio-anthropolgical study undoubtedly
contributed to Firmin’s prediction of the first black president of the First
American Republic, the United States:

Indeed, from this very moment, in the great Federal Republic have Blacks not begun to play a
prominent role in the politics of the various states of the American union? Is it not possible that,
in less than a century from now, a man of Ethiopian-Egyptian origins be called to preside over
the government of Washington and manage the affairs of the most progressive country on earth,
a country which inevitably will become, owing to its agricultural and industrial production, the
richest and most powerful in the world. (Equality, AC 593–94)

It is worth mentioning that, in his study of Firmin, the venerable Haitian

literary historian Pradel Pompilus privileges this 1885 prediction some thirty
years before the 2008 election that neither Firmin nor Pompilus could possi-
bly have foreseen precisely. Pompilus must have recognized what is essential
to Firmin, which is not romantic prophecy but rather scientific prediction.19
From the banks of the Nile River and the Ethiopian-Egyptian dawn, to the
epistemic shift of the Haitian Revolution on banks of the Haitian Artibonite
River, Firmin’s politically and anthropologically visionary text leads prolep-
tically to the U.S. banks of the Mississippi. The Mississippi River, descending

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from northern Minnesota to Louisiana, connecting north and south, was the
nineteenth-century waterway of manifest destiny, the gateway to the Western
territories. On Saturday, Oct. 18, 2008, in St. Louis, Missouri, on the banks of
the Mississippi, and perhaps more significantly in front of the Old Dred Scott
Courthouse built between1864 to 1894, the future first black U.S. president
announced his candidacy. The courthouse named for a slave who the court
held based on his residence was free neither in the territory of eastern Illinois
nor in the new western territory of Wisconsin. According to the justices, Dred
Scott was not a person under the U.S. Constitution since when the Constitu-
tion was drafted in 1787, black people were not considered citizens. Further-
more, Dred Scott was the property of his slave owner, a “person and citizen”
from whom property could not be seized without due process of law. The
1857 Dred Scott issue of the expansion of slavery into the western American
territories contributed to the outbreak of the Civil War. The black presidential
candidate’s journey would take him east of the Mississippi to the storied
banks of the Potomac River, selected by the first republic’s first president,
George Washington, as the site for the nation’s capital, seat of government,
and presidential residence, the White House.
In his 1939 Notebook, Césaire commits to work, to tearing down seem-
ingly insurmountable barriers; he dares to imagine the dawning of the impos-
sible dares to prophesize:

And here in the breaking hours of the dawn is my virile prayer so let me hear neither laughter nor
screams as I fix my eyes upon this city that I prophesy beautiful: for it is not true that the work
of humankind is done […] rather the work has only just begun and there remains for humankind
the work to overcome all the interdictions wedged in the recesses of our fervor. (Césaire, Cahier
68–73)

The struggle against ‘Euro-American reductionism’ and ‘interdictions’

continues in the academy today, and the search is ongoing for what Aimé
Césaire called the lived experience of the events, consequences, and actions
of “the African fact.” The search, demythification, demystification, unburden-
ing, and exposure of the African-Ethiopian fact lead humankind to a blossom-
ing, liberation, and understanding of The Equality of the Human Races. In the
early pages of their cultural revue Tropiques (1941-1945), the Césaires posed
and answered the question “What does Africa mean to us?”20 Suzanne Césaire
elaborated that “Africa does not mean for us solely an expansion towards the
elsewhere, but also a deepening of our knowledge of ourselves.”21 The strug-
gle in the academy is also against Afro-pessimism. Aimé Césaire’s words in
1994 bear repeating at this juncture because he urged abandonment of

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 KEITH LOUIS WALKER

An afro-pessimism, and even an Afro-denigration, an insistence upon the accursed part of the
African fate. There is a kind of hesitation among Blacks of the diaspora—African descendants.
Some, by means of all kinds of contortions are distancing themselves from Africa. In Africa there
are, most certainly, problems of poverty, war, famine, sickness. But there are also other things.
What is needed is a mobilization, a remobilization of all energies—artists, scholars, African
women. We must continue and not slip into a kind of acceptance and resignation.22

These challenging questions and elusive sentiments are at the core of

Joseph-Anténor Firmin’s 1885 essay On the Equality of the Human Races, a
document of great historiographical repair, resonant with Afro-optimism.

Dartmouth College

Notes

1. See Keith L. Walker, Countermodernism and Francophone Literary Culture: The Game of
Slipknot (Durham: Duke U P, 1999) 19–24.
2. Suzanne Césaire. The Great Camouflage: Writings of Dissent (1941–1945), Daniel Max-
imin, ed., Keith L. Walker, trans. and intro. (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan U P, 2012).
3. All translations are my own unless otherwise indicated. I have preferred in some instances
to use translations of Firmin by Asselin Charles, The Equality of the Human Races
(Urbanna-Chicago: U of Illinois P, 2002), indicated as Equality, AC. Here AC 441.
4. Arthur Gobineau, Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines (Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1884)
1:49.
5. Joseph-Anténor Firmin, De l’égalité des races humaines (anthropologie positive) (Paris:
Librairie Cotillon, 1885), 438.
6. Aimé Césaire, Et les chiens se taisaient, Œuvres, Jean-Paul Césaire, ed. (Paris: Éditions
Désormeaux, 1976), 2:59.
7. Aimé Césaire, Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, Œuvres, Jean-Paul Césaire, ed. (Paris: Édi-
tions Désormeaux, 1976), 1:73.
8. Aimé Césaire and Euzhan Palcy, Aimé Césaire: Une voix pour le XXI e siècle (JMJ Produc-
tion, 2006), DVD. ABCésaire (bilingual French/English by K. L.Walker) 35.
9. Philippe Régnier, “Thomas-Ismayl Urbain, métis, saint-simonien et musulman: Crise de
personnalité et crise de civilisation (Égypte, 1835),” in Jean-Claude Vatin, La fuite en
Égypte: Supplément aux voyages européens en Orient (Cairo: CEDEJ, 1989), 299.
10. Gustave d’Eichtal and Ismaÿl Urbain, Lettres sur la race noire (Paris: Paulin, 1839), 22–23.
11. Aimé Césaire, Discours sur le colonialisme, suivi de Discours sur la négritude (Paris: Pré-
sence Africaine, 1995), 84–85.
12. Aimé Césaire, “Poésie et connaissance,” Tropiques, 12 (January 1945): 157–70.
13. Suzanne Césaire, “Malaise d’une civilisation,” Tropiques, 5 (April 1942): 45–46; Suzanne
Césaire, The Great Camouflage, 29–30.
14. Andrew Apter, Beyond Words: Discourse and Critical Agency in Africa (Chicago: U of
Chicago P, 2007).
15. Ayele Bekerie, “The Idea of Ethiopia: Ancient Roots, Modern African Diaspora Thoughts,”
in Power and Nationalism in Modern Africa, Toyin Falola and Salah M. Hassan, eds.
(Durham: Carolina Academic Press, 2008).
16. C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins (1938) (New York: Vintage Books, 1963), 92.
17. Aimé Césaire, Toussaint Louverture: La Révolution française et le problème colonial,
Œuvres, Jean-Paul Césaire, ed. (Paris: Éditions Désormeaux, 1976), 3:242.
18. La Tragégie du roi Christophe. Aimé Césaire, Œuvres, Jean-Paul Césaire, ed. (Paris: Édi-
tions Désormeaux, 1976), 2:143.

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19. Pradel Pompilus, Anténor Firmin par lui-même, le champion de la négritude et de la démo-
cratie (Port-au-Prince: Pegasus, 1988).
20. See Tropiques, 5 (April 1942): 62–70.
21. See Tropiques, 1 (April 1941): 27–36.
22. Euzhan Palcy, Aimé Césaire, une voix pour l’histoire (JMJ Production, 2006), DVD.

144 SPRING 2016