Martinique: Snake Charmer

by Andre Breton and Andre Masson; trans. by David W. Seaman
University of Texas Press, Austin, TX, 2008
96 pp., illus. 18 b/w. Trade, $19.95
ISBN-978-0-292-71765-7.

Reviewed by Allan Graubard
New York, NY, USA

agraubard@yahoo.com



On March 24, 1941 a transatlantic steamer, the Capitaine Paul-Lemerele, pulls out from Marseilles on a month-long journey to Martinique. It carries 350 passengers in just bearable conditions, the majority fleeing war-torn Europe, including several persons of note -- a result of Varian Fry and the American Rescue Committee’s intervention: Andre Breton, his wife Jacqueline and their daughter, Aube; Wilfrado Lam; Claude Levi-Strauss, and Victor Serge with his son, Vlady.

Breton, whom the Vichy government had previously arrested in Marseilles as a “dangerous anarchist,” finds the same greeting in Martinique, where he and his family are interned in the Lazaret concentration camp for several days before being released under surveillance. They stay on the island for three weeks, thence to depart for the Dominican Republic and New York.

Andre Masson arrives on the island shortly after Breton. The two friends meet and agree to discover the island together. As evidence, they gather several texts and drawings under the title, Martinique, charmeuse de serpents, an homage to the Henri Rousseau painting of the same name. Although the volume is small, some 59 pages, the tension and beauty it reveals, as much from the authors status as émigrés as their growing fascination with the island and its black and Creole cultures, provokes even today.

Not only is the volume now in English -- first published in 1948 by editions Sagittaires, Paris, then reissued in 1972 by Jean-Jacque Pauvert editions, Paris – but we can reaffirm in its pages an appreciation of indigenous culture and recognition of the coming movement for Black emancipation that will reconfigure the map of Africa post-WW II as it finds ever greater expression in the Civil Rights Movement in the United States, and elsewhere. That such values make common cause today against other oppressive regimes should not mask the fact that then they contradicted colonialism both as a sensibility and political-economic system – a dangerous thing to do.

A preface, six texts (with one collectively written), Masson’s drawings: this is the book. “We were both wildly seduced at the same time we were wounded and indignant,” Breton explains of the situation they faced in the place they were in. Happily, a transparent period, a period of perfect communication prevails between the two men as this voluptuously tropical, erotic, and underdeveloped island, with its history so intimately tied to that of France, consumes them.

The majority of the preface continues in another vein, however, with a piece of scientific research, a psychology of doubles, and an intriguing interpretation by Breton that sees in a photographic montage an act of resistance and a poetic methodology.

Antille, a poem by Andre Masson, follows: not so much to frame the setting with its “grand ballet of palms” as to infuse the island with the kind of metaphor most natural to it.

The Creole Dialogue between Andre Breton and Andre Masson is just that: apparently written by exchanging paragraphs after walks and discussion until the text was complete. Here the island takes on myriad potencies within the exceptional details that the writers disclose. They are amazed that Rousseau’s painting finds an objective correlate without the artist ever having visited the island, and point to the mediumistic qualities of his work as a key to artistic creation. They valorize the native canna blossom as an emblem of reconciliation between the “obtainable and the wild beyond, between life and the dream” – a penultimate image characteristic of the quality of their exchanges.

Some trembling pins is a series of eight poems that Breton wrote on the back of eight local post cards he found there. The title comes from a description by Lafcadio Hearn of the “trembling pins of gold” that the women of the island used to fasten their headscarves with. Each poem is unique with one dedicated to Suzanne Cesaire, and another to her husband, Aime Cesaire, with George Gratient and Rene Menil. These four, whom Breton met through a chance discovery of their journal Tropiques at a variety store, convince him that the voice of poetry and revolt is here, on this island, a beacon illuminating our human future despite the horrors of World War II.

Troubled Waters, a factual account of Breton’s arrival in Martinique and what transpired thereafter, also contains a probing analysis of the political character of the island, and why the divide between the few rich and many poor had sustained without fierce opposition.

In A Great Black Poet, the crux of the book, Breton introduces Aime Cesaire as a poet of originality and brilliance. His epic poem, Return to My Native Land, becomes, for Breton, “the greatest lyrical monument of our time.” And Cesaire quickly rises to the forefront of surrealism internationally. In years to come he will win the mayoralty of Fort de France, enter and depart the communist party (in protest against the Soviet invasion of Hungary, 1956), and write works that endure, as much on the page as the stage. His Discourse on Colonialism is an essential critique of racist expropriation and Western intellectual collusion to protect the “investment” from indigenous democratic rule.

The book closes with the poem Formerly Known as Liberty Street, where Breton returns, for a moment, to the flute player in the painting by Rousseau, so significant to Breton and Masson. For here, in Martinique, this woman lives, as does the beauty, allure and danger that the paintings evokes: “Her breasts of twilight in the dusk of Senegal roses.” Thankfully, she is one among other women (and men) that they see or meet during their brief but propitious sojourn on Martinique.