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Aimé CESAIRE

Et les chiens se taisaient

Présence africaine, Paris 1956, 12x18,5cm, broché.

Et les chiens se taisaient
[And the dogs shut up]
 

First edition for which there has not been any grand papier (deluxe copies) printed.
Beautiful copy perfectly set.
 
A beautiful handwritten inscription signed by Aimé Césaire: “à Jean-Paul Sartre dont l'étude sur la “négritude” a puissamment contribué à éclairer la route. Avec amitié et admiration. A. Césaire. 11 Oct. 1956.” (“To Jean-Paul Sartre whose study on “negritude” powerfully contributed to shedding light on the way. With friendship and admiration. A. Césaire. 11 Oct. 1956.”)
 
Bound in dark grey calf, smooth spine, gilt head, covers and spine preserved and sunned, spine browned with restorations, covers partially stained and second cover with a fold, binding signed Boichot.
 
The famous preface by Jean-Paul Sartre, Orphée Noir, written at Senghor's request for his Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue français in 1948, produced an earthquake among intellectuals and contributed to transforming the concept of “negritude”, a political and poetic claim that appeared between the two wars and was led by Aimé Césaire and Léopold Sédar Senghor.
 
Until then, only poetic language succeeded in formalising the semantic conflict intrinsic to this noun borrowed from the lexical field of the oppressor. Between the necessary identity claim and an involuntary contribution to racial essentialisation, “negritude” will find under Sartre's pen, a philosophical legitimacy reconciling identity and universality: ” The theoretical and practical affirmation of white supremacy is the thesis; the position of Negritude as an antithetical value is the moment of negativity. But this negative moment is not sufficient in itself, and these black men who use it know this perfectly well; they know that it aims at preparing the synthesis or realization of the human being in a raceless society. Thus Negritude is for destroying itself, it is a “crossing to” and not an “arrival at,” a means and not an end. In the moment that the black Orpheus closely embrace this Eruydice, they feel that she vanishes in their arms.”
 
Moreover, the construction of the Sartrean theory is mainly driven by Césaire's poetical works: “Thus the word black is found to contain all Evil and all Good, it covers up an almost unbearable tension between two contradictory classifications: solar hierarchy and racial hierarchy. It gains thereby an extraordinary poetry, like self-destructive objects from the hands of Duchamp and the Surrealists; there is a secret blackness in white, a secret whiteness in black, a fixed flickering of Being and of Non-being which is perhaps nowhere expressed as well as in this poem by Césaire:
“Ma grande statue blessée une pierre au front ma grande chair inattentive de jour à grains sans pitié ma grande chair de nuit à grain de jour ...” [“My tall wounded statue, a stone in its fore head; my great inattentive day flesh with pitiless spots, my great night flesh with day spots.”]
The poet will go even further; he writes:
“Nos faces belles comme le vrai pouvoir opératoire de la négation.” [“Our beautiful faces like the true operative power of negation.""
 
This sublime inscription by Césaire to Sartre, much more than a simple acknowledgement, is the poignant testimony of the second key moment in the fight for the equality of people by two of its main actors, after the abolition of slavery and before the end of decolonisation.

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