On March 21, in the wake of the Journée internationale de la francophonie, Mauritius celebrated one of its greatest literary texts, a poem and manifesto that opened the door to a new world. That evening, the Mauritian poet Michel Ducasse, with the lyricism and benevolent complicity of actor and director Jacques Martial, launched his own translation into Morisian kreol of the poem Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (Notebook on a return to the native land) by Aimé Césaire. Dominique Bellier
Several Creole-speaking authors, such as Raphaël Confiant, have translated the founding text of the négritude movement, without ever publishing it. The Morisian Kreol version breaks new ground by opening a breach in the Creole language. This publication by Vilaz Metis is a world first, with the blessing of the publisher Présence Africaine, who has published Césaire extensively.
Each Creole language has its own music, shaping a particular world of which it is also the fruit, and a few manage to communicate with each other. Let’s hope that other Creole-language versions will follow. The beautiful title, Dan balizaz barlizour, is a translation of a recurring expression in Césaire’s text, “au bout du petit matin”, which recurs like a glimmer of hope. This choice has the virtue of demonstrating the metaphorical power of Morisian kreol.
Michel Ducasse recalls in the preface his own discovery of the Cahier, while preparing his doctorate in France. “At the end of this reading, which took me by the throat and left me panting, wavering and defeated, I realized that I still had a long way to go to find this poetic breath, this incandescent verve, this burn from which one never emerges unscathed.”
Publishing this text at just 26, the Martinican poet set the bar high, with his linguistic erudition, lyricism and intellectual rigor. Césaire had madness and genius. Like his friend Senghor, a few years after the revolting human zoo that was the 1931 Colonial Exhibition, Césaire was seething from within. He became aware of the imperative need to express the strength and intelligence of the Black people, and to deliver a humanist message in the Europe of 1939, which was running to its doom under the Nazi yoke. Césaire’s poetry is a volcano that is always ready to flow into the river,” says Michel Ducasse. It teaches us not to remain silent in the face of the powerful…”.
Twinned with the christening of Maurice’s Prix Goncourt, the launch took place at the IFM in front of a packed amphitheater. Musicians Samuel Laval and Patrick Desvaux accompanied the magnetic tessitura of the Cahier’s greatest cantor, Jacques Martial, who has been interpreting this text around the world for 22 years, and the swaying intonations of Michel Ducasse’s kreol… Martial worries about a concordance in time between September 39, when the Cahier was published, and March 2025: “I hope we won’t have to relive moments like September 39…”.
