surreal cesaire

quotes from discourse on colonialism by aime cesaire

from intro by robin d.g. kelley:

“in the finest hegelian fashion, cesaire demonstrates how colonialism works to ‘decivilize’ the colonizer: torture, violence, race hatred, and immorality constitute a dead weight on the so-called civilized, pulling the master class deeper and deeper into the abyss of barbarism.”

“europe is also dependent. anticipating fanon’s famous proposition that ‘europe is literally the creation of the third world,’ cesaire reveals, over and over again, that the colonizers’ sense of superiority, their sense of mission as the world’s civilizers, depends on turning the Other into a barbarian.”

from 'murderous humanitarianism' by rene crevel et al: 

“we surrealists pronounced ourselves in favor of changing the imperialist war, in its chronic and colonial form, into a civil war. thus we placed our energies at the disposal of the revolution, of the proletariat and its struggles, and defined our attitude towards the colonial problem, and hence towards the color question.”

“cesaire provocatively points out that europeans tolerated ‘nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-european peoples; that they have cultivated that nazism, that they are responsible for it, and that before engulfing the whole edifice of western, christian civilization in its reddened waters, it oozes, seeps, and trickles from every crack.’ so the real crime of fascism was the application to white people of colonial procedures ‘which until then had been reserved exclusively for the arabs of algeria, the ‘coolies’ of india, and the ‘niggers’ of africa.’

///book///

“what am i driving at? at this idea: that no one colonizes innocently, that no one colonizes with impunity either; that a nation which colonizes, that a civilization which justifies colonization – and therefore force – is already a sick civilization, a civilization which is morally diseased, which irresistibly, progressing from one consequence to another, one denial to another, calls for its hitler, i mean its punishment.”

“colonization, i repeat, dehumanizes even the most civilized man; that colonial activity, colonial enterprise, colonial conquest, which is based on contempt for the native and justified by that contempt, inevitably tends to change him who undertakes it; that the colonizer, who in order to ease his conscience gets into the habit of seeing the other man as an animal, accustoms himself to treating him like an animal, and tends objectively to transform himself into an animal.”

“security? culture? the rule of law? in the meantime, i look around and wherever there are colonizers and colonized face to face, i see force, brutality, cruelty, sadism, conflict, and, in a parody of education, the hasty manufacture of a few thousand subordinate functionaries, ‘boys,’ artisans, office clerks, and interpreters necessary for the smooth operation of business.

i spoke of contact.

between colonizer and colonized there is room only for forced labor, intimidation, pressure, the police, taxation, theft, rape, compulsory crops, contempt, mistrust, arrogance, self-complacency, swinishness, brainless elites, degraded masses.”

“they talk to me about local tyrants brought to reason; but i note that in general the old tyrants get on very well with the new ones, and that there has been established between them, to the detriment of the people, a circuit of mutual services and complicity.”

“and sweep out all the obscurers, all the inventors of subterfuges, the charlatans and tricksters, the dealers in gobbledygook. and do not seek to know whether personally these gentleman are in good or bad faith, whether personally they have good or bad intentions. whether personally  - that is, in the private conscience of peter or paul – they are or are not colonialists, because the essential thing is that their highly problematical subjective good faith is entirely irrelevant to the objective social implications of the evil work they perform as watchdogs of colonialism.”

“’it is not by losing itself in the human universe, with its blood and its spirit, that france will be universal, it is by remaining itself.’ that is what the french bourgeoisie has come to, five years after the defeat of hitler! and it is precisely in that that its historic punishment lies: to be condemned, returning to it as though driven by a vice, to chew over hitler’s vomit.”

an impermissible and secret weakness

excerpt from the emperor’s tomb by joseph roth

for a long time I fought, vainly, against this love, not so much because I felt myself endangered by it, but because I feared the unspoken scorn of my skeptical friends. in those days, just before the great war, there prevailed a disdainful pride, an overweaning self-identification with ‘decadence’, so-called, with a half-assumed, over-acted weariness and unfounded boredom. in this atmosphere there was hardly room for sentiment. as for passion, that was in the worst of taste. my friends had small unimportant liaisons with women whom they would put aside, and indeed sometimes lend out, like overcoats; women whom one forgot, like umbrellas, or left behind on purpose like heavy parcels, for which one does not trouble to look for fear that they might be brought back. the circle in which I moved considered love an aberration, engagement a form of apoplexy, marriage an incurable disease. we were young. we regarded marriage, indeed, as an inescapable part of life, just as we recognized that in twenty or thirty years arterio-sclerosis must inevitably set in. I could have found many opportunities to be alone with the girl, although in those days it was taken for granted that a young lady could not spend more than an hour alone with a young gentleman without an acceptable excuse. I took advantage of only a few of these opportunities. as I said, to have taken them all would have shamed me in the eyes of my friends. indeed, I was at pains to ensure that nothing of my feelings was observed and I often used to worry that one or other of my circle might well know something of the matter, that I might already have betrayed myself in one way or another. when, on occasion, I joined my friends unexpectedly I would assume from their sudden silence that, just before my arrival, they had been discussing my love for elizabeth kovacs. I would be put out, as if I had been caught out doing something wrong, or as if some impermissible and secret weakness had been discovered in me. during the few hours, however, which I spent alone with elizabeth I seemed to sense the lack of meaning and, indeed, of responsibility in my friends’ scorn, skepticism and arrogant ‘decadence’. yet at the same time I suffered from a kind of nagging conscience at having betrayed their sacred principles. I therefore led, in a certain sense, a double life, and I found that it did not agree with me at all.