“Everything collapses in the ripping sound of great manifestations,” wrote Suzanne Césaire in 1945. The line purportedly described an immense hurricane in the Caribbean Sea, but knowing Césaire—a formidable theorist, postcolonial and feminist activist, and surrealist from Martinique—“great manifestations” also referred to seismic shifts in history and decolonization. A critic who wrote with the revolutionary force of manifestos and the wisdom of the longue durée, Césaire published in the short-lived literary journal Tropiques, which she established with her husband in 1941 and co-edited. There appeared the only seven essays she ever completed. After 1945, she would not publish again.
Due to her relatively small body of work, as well as societal misogyny then and now, Césaire’s legacy is often overshadowed by that of her husband, Aimé Césaire. Award-winning poet, former president of the Regional Council of Martinique, and mayor of Fort-de-France for 56 years, Aimé is an icon of postcolonial politics and Francophone literature. He published many books, such as Discourse on Colonialism, and is memorialized across France, Martinique, and elsewhere. Still, even with no clear answer to the question of why Suzanne Césaire stopped writing, her contributions have become seminal texts in surrealist, feminist, and communist movements, especially those rooted in Black and anticolonial struggles.
Two offerings in the Dallas-Fort Worth area are a testament to the small but sure renaissance of Césaire’s legacy. In 2024, María Elena Ortiz, curator at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, organized the exhibition Surrealism and Us: Caribbean and African Diasporic Artists since 1940, named after Césaire’s essay, “1943: Surrealism and Us.” This summer in Dallas, artist Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich will screen her new film, an experimental take on a biopic, The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire. Ortiz and Hunt-Ehrlich, friends and collaborators, are making an important revision to our historical record and proposing profound questions about nature, fascism, race, and gender from the Caribbean to Europe to the United States.
