• 1 I am grateful to Kora Véron, Alex Gil, Fredo Rivera, and an anonymous reviewer for reading earlier (...)
• 2 Aimé Césaire, “Wifredo Lam”, Cahiers d’art (1945-1946), p. 357.
• 3 Ibid.
• 4 I draw on my prior reading of “au bout” in “au bout du petit matin”, the structuring anaphora of Cé (...)

1In Aimé Césaire’s essay on Wifredo Lam’s art from the mid-1940s, he signals both the universal reach and particular location of Lam’s work1. He first describes the universal gift of Lam’s work as follows: « Dans une société où la machine et l’argent ont démesurément agrandi la distance de l’homme aux choses, Wifredo Lam fixe sur la toile la cérémonie pour laquelle toutes existent : la cérémonie de l’union physique de l’homme et du monde2. » In this formulation, Césaire ascribes to Lam’s painting a reparative quality to the alienation imposed by modernity. Lam’s art as ceremony restores the unity fractured by modernity. Lam’s particular location (or locus of enunciation) for this kind of work is as important, and Césaire positions it in a poetic formulation: « Et que c’est au nom de ces hommes, au nom de ces rescapés du plus grand naufrage de l’histoire, que parle Wifredo Lam3. » The move is subtle, and Césaire is not specific here about which peoples exactly Lam paints in the name of, but the context of Césaire’s reading of Lam includes the history of empire in the Caribbean that shapes both artists, including the history of chattel slavery, the lack of restitution for the formerly enslaved upon abolition, the regime of indentured labor that succeeded from it, and the continued racialized character of dispossession throughout the Caribbean and beyond. While Césaire writes about Lam, we might also understand Césaire’s work as a universal restoration of the world enacted in the name of the survivors of history’s greatest shipwreck. The ceremony of Lam’s work, like that of Césaire’s, starts from the alienation of the survivors of history and takes flight from the distortions of history’s violence to the edge (au bout) of its beyond, where the fundamental unity between the human and the world may be found4.

• 5 The 2011 Grand Palais exhibition, « Aimé Césaire, Lam, Picasso : ‘Nous nous sommes trouvés’» contri (...)
• 6 Some Lam scholars suggest specifically that Lam was influenced by Aimé Césaire’s hybrid human-plant (...)

2Between Césaire and Lam we have evidence of a highly impactful original encounter that necessarily touches each other’s work and a lifetime of collaborations, but even this evidence does not permit us to pinpoint exactly who thought what first and who built on who, or what missing references may be present from those among them5. There is a presumption recorded in the scholarly record, however, that Césaire greatly influenced Lam6. The inexact work of characterizing collaboration and a genealogy of influence necessarily relies greatly on speculation, on dreaming up connections in the space between the works, about the conceptual lives implied by the records, in dialogue with the works. In one of their understudied shared projects between text and image, I argue that their work pushes a Western structure of hierarchical and oppositional thought related to the history of conquest to its edge, or takes flight from conquest. I refer with this argument to their work on the text and image figures of “colombes” (doves) and the “menfenil” (a bird of prey found throughout the Americas) that recur in both the poet and painter’s work. My analysis of Césaire and Lam’s collaborative work on “colombes” and the “menfenil” positions the meaning-making of their work on these two bird-figures, as a reciprocal production demonstrating a great aesthetic affinity between both artists, even as each artist’s work is distinct from the other’s.

• 7 My thought process on these questions has also occurred in an extended dialogue with Erika Renée Wi (...)

3Eskil Lam introduced me to his father’s 1947 painting “Menfenil” in Paris in 2012, when I first started researching the relationship between painter and poet, just weeks after I had the chance to study typescript and manuscript versions of Césaire’s early collection of poems “Colombes et menfenil” in Martinique. The painting made a strong impression on me as I thought through it in relation to Césaire’s little-known poetry title. These works have been latent in my process of thinking through the values of conquest in contemporary discourse, including positive values associated with whiteness and negative values associated with darkness, and I fold that thinking process back into the research and writing of this essay7. The “colombe” and the “menfenil” as prey and predator are both overdetermined in value through Western symbolism as bird types, and both are also more complicated than the symbolic value-laden images they evoke as the white dove of peace and the dark-ominous bird of prey and war. By “overdetermined in value”, I mean that there are multiple axes of value that converge on the birds that unconsciously align with the racialized social order of the Americas constructed by the history of conquest. I propose with this essay a critical dialogue with Césaire and Lam’s work on these birds to diffuse the conquest-thinking that informs the symbolic economy and contributes to normalizing the persistence of racialized hierarchies embedded in the history of colonial dispossession, extraction, and labor power. In their collaborative aesthetic recasting of these archetypal bird figures, I argue that both poet and painter take them over and demonstrate how to fly the mind out of conquest.

• 8 See André Breton, “Martinique charmeuse de serpents : Un Grand poète noir”, Tropiques, n° 11, 1944, (...)
• 9 Helena Benitez, Wifredo and Helena: my life with Wifredo Lam, 1939-1950, Sylvio Acatos, 1999, p. 5.
• 10 As Sims has noted, there is evidence in Lam and his wife’s correspondence with André Breton that He (...)

4Lam would meet Césaire in 1941 on a stopover in Martinique on his way to Cuba—he was notably on the same boat with his friend, the poet and theorist of surrealism André Breton, and the not-yet famous anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss for that stopover. Lam, the Cuban painter of African, Chinese, and European descent, was one of many artists who fled Vichy-occupied France after the Nazi German defeat of French forces. As the story goes, Breton found a copy of Tropiques in a bookstore in Fort-de-France, and he was so impressed by it, he arranged to meet the group behind the magazine through the bookshop owner8. Lam and his wife at the time, Helena Benitez (then Holzer), would love meeting Aimé and Suzanne Césaire, and they would stay connected. According to Holzer’s memoir of her time with Lam, he was deeply moved when he heard Aimé Césaire read his famous poem, Cahier d’un retour au pays natal9. Back in Cuba, she would support the poem’s translation by Euro-Cuban writer and ethnographer Lydia Cabrera, who was a close collaborator of Lam’s10. And Lam’s love of the poem would manifest in illustrations for the resulting book.

• 11 Aimé Césaire, Retorno al país natal, trans. Lydia Cabrera, Ucar García, y cía, 1943. It’s worth not (...)
• 12 See Aimé Césaire, “Conscience raciale et révolution sociale”, L’Étudiant noir, n° 3, 1935, p. 1-2.

5When Lam met Césaire, he had recently had his first Paris exhibition, in 1939 at the Pierre Loeb Gallery, and just three years later, he would debut in New York and catapult into international circulation as a highly regarded surrealist painter from a circle of friends and comrades that included Breton and Pablo Picasso. His work of abstract imagery drawing on African aesthetic forms and rooted in Afro-Caribbean religiosity and Caribbean landscapes would become iconic in Cuba and beyond, and his paintings are currently held in many museums around the world. Césaire in turn had published in August 1939 the first version of the Cahier in the Paris-based magazine Volontés. He left France soon after this publication and returned home to Martinique where he became a schoolteacher and began editing the literary magazine Tropiques with a group of collaborators including those who along with him were its most frequent contributors, his wife Suzanne Césaire and René Ménil. During the 1940s he would also grow international recognition by publishing in literary magazines in New York, Santiago de Chile, Buenos Aires, Alexandria, and Havana. Aimé Césaire had not yet published a book by this time, and in fact the 1943 Cuban Cahier, whose publication Lam instigated, would become the first published volume of his poetry11. Lam’s Paris-based archive, the SDO Lam, holds an annotated typescript version of the Cahier d’un retour au pays natal that was most likely used for this edition. The resulting book, a boutique, 300-copy edition, was rendered all-the-more valuable by Lam’s three illustrations for it. Césaire would go on to become a poet, playwright, and political writer of great international acclaim and influence; and many dissertations, articles, books, and documentaries have been dedicated to his work. Much of Césaire’s later claim to fame may be attributed to his linguistically reformulating blackness in French through coining the term “négritude”, first in 1935 and more famously in the Cahier d’un retour au pays natal12.When Césaire and Lam met, they were both in an incubating phase, however. They were on the rise as artists, but they had not yet added to their persons the aesthetic reputations that would accompany them for the rest of their lives. To what extent did their encounter in Martinique, at a time of great rupture for both men, brought on by the tragic circumstances of Nazi victory over France, impact both of their becoming acclaimed and monumental artists during this time?

• 13 Odette Casamayor-Cisneros has suggested a greater approximation than might otherwise be gleaned bet (...)
• 14 Paget Henry outlines in dialogue with Fanon how the colonial context disrupted the Afro-Caribbean p (...)

6The mutual enchantment caused by the meeting of these two great and kindred artists is understandable. In their life’s work we can observe a corresponding aesthetic commitment and practice: while both artists counter the work of the history of slavery and empire in producing a racist structure of knowledge and symbolic representation, neither sought to intervene aesthetically through observably realist representations, preferring to refract their visions into text and image in ways that have been readable through the framework of surrealism, but which are also close in many ways to the aesthetics of the “neo-Baroque” that would be applied to other Caribbean artists who elaborated beyond-realist work13. Because both artists would be written about by surrealism’s central theorist and practitioner André Breton who facilitated their encounter, it has become the most dominant structure for understanding both of their works, but it is important to note that their aesthetic aims were distinct from those of French surrealists, as their work excavated the psyche in order to diffuse the distortion of reality imposed by the history of empire and its attendant racial ideologies14.

• 15 According to the document, it was one of fifty copies given to Césaire for distribution.

7In their meeting and after, Césaire would also demonstrate the extent of Lam’s impact on him. He would gift him a tiré à part, a signed and dedicated limited edition of the Volontés publication of the poem (also held in the SDO Lam)15. The dedication to Lam in this gift edition of the poem unites the two artists through their shared Afro-Caribbean origins as well as the aesthetic affinities they shared in their unique approaches to poeticizing Afro-diasporic and Caribbean-located experience. The dedication in verse style thus reads:

• 16 See Kora Véron’s online exposition of the “Colombes et menfenil” typescript collection: https://www (...)

9Césaire’s first installment or version of the Cahier d’un retour au pays natal from 1939 already figures a prominent “menfenil” and a “colombe” before he would put the two together in the title of the much lesser-known collection of poems. “Colombes et menfenil” would later become one of the collections of poetry in the larger volume for Césaire’s 1946 book Les Armes miraculeuses. The André Breton archive housed at the Schœlcher Library in Martinique holds a typescript and manuscript collection of Césaire’s poems that were sent to Breton during the 1940s for consideration16. The typescript set of poems, with handwritten corrections, include the poems “Au delà”, “N’ayez point pitié de moi”, “Survie”, “Poème pour l’aube”, “Soleil serpent” (although this poem remains untitled in Breton’s typescript copy), “Tam-tam de nuit”, “Femme d’eau”, and “Batouque”. There is one poem in manuscript form held in this collection, the poem “Simouns”, which is dedicated to Wifredo Lam.

• 17 “Tam-tam II” would also appear in a 1943 issue of the French surrealist magazine produced in New Yo (...)
• 18 In Lam’s case, it is important that the legacy of his Chinese father also complemented the ethnic a (...)
• 19 Aimé Césaire, Les Armes miraculeuses, Gallimard, 1970 (1946), p. 69-70.
• 20 While the poem and its genetic evolution certainly deserve more attention as a crucial component of (...)

10“Simouns” would not be published in Les Armes miraculeuses in its entirety. Much of the poem, with several changes including cuts of approximately one-third of the poem would appear in revised form as “Les oubliettes de la mer et du déluge”, which is not dedicated to Lam in the published volume. Instead, a very short poem “Tam-tam II” appears with a dedication to Lam17. “Simoun” in the singular, has a double meaning that indexes both Africa and Europe: the word comes from the Arabic to refer to sandstorm winds. The “Caudron Simoun” was also a four-seat monoplane developed during the 1930s and used by Air Bleu to transport mail. In the plural, Césaire likely expressed both his and Lam’s art as “Simouns”, both winds and planes, articulating the hybrid legacy in their work drawing on both African and European traditions18. The cutting of this title and the dedication to Lam in what remains of this poem in “Les oubliettes de la mer et du déluge” with a title connoting forgotten losses, would imply a significant shift of meaning-making19. The cut title, “Simouns”, with its double meaning, more closely approximates the work of poeticizing in text and image the multiple meanings of other flying beings at issue here: doves and birds of prey20.

• 21 I am grateful to Alex Gil for locating this publication and identifying the coincidence of the illu (...)

11A collection of Césaire’s poems with the title “Colombes et menfenil” would also be published in the French-language literary magazine edited by Ivan Goll, Hémisphères (vol. 1, n° 4, 1944), with an illustration by Wifredo Lam21. This publication included seven of the poems held in the Fonds Breton, or seven out of those Breton presumably had been sent by Césaire for potential publication: “Au delà”, “N’ayez point pitié de moi”, “Survie”, “Poème pour l’aube”, “Soleil serpent”, “Tam tam de nuit” and “Femme d’eau”. Lam’s one-page illustration that accompanies this collection happens to be identical to the most elaborate of the three illustrations Lam included in the Cuban Cahier.

• 22 Carl G. Jung, “Approaching the Unconscious,” Man and His Symbols, Laurel, 1968, p. 67.
• 23 Ibid., p. 57.
• 24 Ibid., p. 87.

13Carl Jung, who was a highly influential thinker during the 1940s and 1950s, may be helpful for understanding the role of the dove and the menfenil as archetypes in Césaire and Lam’s work. Jung explained that the sense-making that happened in dreams often consisted of images whose symbolic value were based on archaic material, which he called “archetypes”. While Jung reproduced a “primitive” and “civilized” dichotomy (although like many European modernists he participated in the dichotomy by undervaluing rather than overvaluing “civilized” society), several of his theories have nonetheless become embedded in academic, aesthetic, and lay understandings of psychology and the relationship between art and society. One of these is the power of excavating and reformulating archetypes, observable in Césaire and Lam. According to Jung’s explanation of the work of dreams, the unconscious “seems to be guided chiefly by instinctive trends, represented by corresponding thought forms, that is by archetypes22.” For this idea, Jung draws on Freud’s idea of the unconscious part of the brain as organized by “archaic remnants23.” These archaic remnants correspond to a historically and generationally produced order to unconscious thought forms of the kind that could apply to the values of conquest that connect to racial hierarchies in colonial history. Jung himself suggested that the cultural symbols made up by archetypes “evoke this psychic charge that makes them function much the same way as prejudices24.” If archetypes function like prejudices, archetypes are also powerful forms for intervening in structures of value that psychically enforce racial prejudice.

• 26 Ibid.
• 27 Although it is not the same argument I make here, it is worth drawing attention to the compelling c (...)

15The “hallucinating figures” with the power to surprise are those I understand as archetypes at work in Lam’s paintings. Max-Pol Fouchet would use the term “avenging figures” to translate Lam’s sense of his work as a “Trojan horse” that might “disturb the dreams of the exploiters”. Rather than turn to social realism, Fouchet tells us that Lam “preferred to entrust his message to great avenging figures, rising out of the country’s unhappy subconscious and imposing their presence like specters in order to work on the demolition of the prisons and hovels of contempt26.” I am particularly interested in this idea of “great avenging figures” and the idea of disrupting dreams when I examine the work both Lam and Césaire do on the archetypes of doves and birds of prey27. Césaire did, after all, note their shared “dreams” in his dedication to Lam.

• 28 Sims, op. cit., p. 51.
• 29 Casamayor-Cisneros, op. cit., p. 31 (my translation).

16If, as Jung indicates, archaic thought forms present themselves to the unconscious mind as archetypal images, the imagery of Afro-Caribbean spiritual practices utilized by Lam could also have the effect of evoking African cosmologies and systems of value that might challenge or re-route the spiritual and intellectual work of psychic conquest. For Lam, the regular use of imagery associated with the orishas or pantheon of god-spirits of the Lucumí or Yoruba religion (often called santería) practiced in Cuba functions as something other than worship. Lowery Stokes Sims suggests in relation to Lam’s aesthetic use of Afro-Caribbean spiritual symbols that during the 1940s Lam was “devising a way to depict metamorphic and metaphysical entities28”. Odette Casamayor-Cisneros also explains that Lam’s allegorical references to symbols of sacred African origin indicate “a continuous and total metamorphosis that Lam expresses in his paintings29”. I am interested in metamorphosis in his work that dialogues with Césaire through the use of the orishas, and in particular Elegguá, as an archetype of transformation.

• 30 Jung, op. cit., p. 90.
• 31 Aimé Césaire, “Poésie et connaissance”, Tropiques n^° 12 (1945), p. 164. As Alex Gil has noted this (...)
• 32 André Breton, Manifestes du surréalisme, Éditions Gallimard, 1979, p. 49.
• 33 Suzanne Césaire, “Le surréalisme et nous”, Tropiques, n° 8-9, 1943, p. 18.
• 34 Aimé Césaire, op. cit., p. 167. For an earlier approach to this dialogue between the Césaires, see (...)
• 35 See Aimé Césaire, Discourse on colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham, Monthly Review Press, 2000, p. 36- (...)

17To what extent does Césaire’s work similarly intervene in and construct archetypes poetically ? Jung suggests that in dreams archetypal symbols have the function of “attempts to reconcile and reunite opposites within the psyche30”. In Césaire’s poetry we often see a poetic parade of opposites united, sometimes even in the same word. Poetry, like the dream and the painting, lends itself well to excavating unconscious realities. And Césaire understood poetry as the realm in which “rien n’est jamais plus près de rien que de son contraire”, implicitly ascribing to poetry itself the function that psychoanalysts like Freud and Jung ascribed to dreams31. In the essay, “Poésie et connaissance,” he builds on Breton’s work on the surrealist image as best exemplified by bringing together the most disparate of elements, but Césaire extends the power that Breton ascribes to surrealist practice to the whole of poetry32. In Suzanne Césaire’s earlier essay, “1943 : Le surréalisme et nous,” she elaborates a related idea about surrealist poetry. According to her, it has the power to transcend “les sordides antinomies actuelles: blancs-noirs, européens-africains, civilisés-sauvages33”. Surely, Suzanne Césaire had Aimé Césaire’s exemplary poetic practice of approximating opposites in mind when she offered this proposition. In turn, Aimé Césaire would go on to explain in very similar terms that precisely because the poetic image exceeds (dépasse) what is perceived, “la dialectique de l’image transcende les antinomies” in “Poésie et connaissance34”. The difficulty in following this poetic theory, I think, is in the idea of “transcendence”. In my reading of Césaire and Lam’s work on oppositional images, the result is not the transcendence of hierarchical binaries as peaceful communion, but rather transcendence as elevating beyond the constraints imposed by the hierarchical oppositions that naturalize the history of conquest. Embedded into the colonial history of the West, there is a tradition of producing oppositions through the framework of good /evil and right /wrong on the side of conquest, a tradition that Césaire would go on to connect to the force of Nazism in Europe35. Aimé Césaire and Wifredo Lam’s collaborative aesthetic work on doves and raptors, as I will go on to demonstrate, would thus use poetic methods to fly our minds beyond the hierarchical structure of oppositional thought produced by the history of conquest and bring the world into new light.

• 36 F. Abiola Irele refers to the dove’s significance as a symbol of Pentecost. See F. Abiola Irele, “C (...)

18Aimé Césaire’s title “Colombes et menfenil” exemplifies exactly the aesthetic strategy of bringing opposites together for poetic inquiry. The title engages a multiplicity of meanings in dialogue with a highly overdetermined one, that of the colombe, or the dove. If a colombe is a dove, it is important to note that it is of the same family (columbidae) as the pigeon, a bird that in urban contexts especially loses the meaning usually ascribed to doves. Not all languages include the difference between doves and pigeons, however; and in Spanish, for example, they are both known as “paloma”. Only the white dove, or the “paloma blanca” in Spanish, retains the imagery of the dove associated with peace and holiness, due to its function to symbolize Pentecost in Christianity36.

• 37 Kora Véron, Aimé Césaire, Configurations, Seuil, 2021, p. 177-178.
• 38 Ernstpeter Ruhe, “L’Anticlaudelianus d’Aimé Césaire : intertextualité dans Et les chiens se taisaie (...)

20The presence of “colombe” in an anticolonial poetics such as Césaire’s also recalls the Genoese explorer named Cristobal Colón in Spanish, Christophe Colomb in French, and Christopher Columbus in English. The infamous navigator, who until the present in some contexts is revered for his achievement of stumbling into the Caribbean on a voyage to shorten the trading route to Southeast Asia by traveling southwest from Europe, finds himself implicated ironically in Césaire’s image of the colombe. Kora Véron has elaborated this reading of Césaire’s title. As she indicates, the Genoese navigator’s writings would also serve as the reference for the title to Césaire’s first play, Et les chiens se taisaient (And the dogs were silent), which he was also writing during this period and would publish alongside the volume of poetry in the book Les Armes miraculeuses. Césaire likely read several diaries of the conquerors of the Americas, and in the title to the play he draws specifically on the fact that in his diaries, Colón (Colomb) was struck by the island dogs who did not bark37. Ernstpeter Ruhe has examined Césaire’s work to reverse what Alex Gil also calls Paul Claudel’s “obscene redemption” of Colomb in Le livre de Christophe Colomb38.

• 39 Michel-Rolph Trouillot discusses the ideological values of these naming practices. See Trouillot, S (...)
• 40 Véron describes this irony and indicates that Césaire also surely drew on Apollinaire’s Calligramme (...)
• 41 Sylvia Wynter, “Columbus, The Ocean Blue, And Fables that Stir the Mind”. Poetics of the Americas: (...)

21When we consider that the symbolic image of “colombes” recalls the overdetermined image of Colomb the man, a perfect example emerges for the contextual work of meaning-making in Césaire. Colomb’s value is encoded by perspective: those who identify with colonizers and those nations that implicitly ask their citizens to identify with colonizers have revered the “discoverer,” but those peoples and nations who identify with those who were colonized, enslaved, and/or dispossessed in the wake of Colomb’s transitional moment in the shaping of modernity have mourned the “conquest” of the Americas that he inaugurated39. From the latter vantage point, the symbol of peace coinciding linguistically with the man “Colomb” is certainly ironic, as he would perhaps be represented more appropriately with a bird of prey associated with war40. The world is not of course so neatly divided, for many of us are in fact ancestrally shaped by both conquerors and conquered, oppressors and oppressed, enslavers and enslaved, predators and prey. Raptors are also more complex, as they are associated with beauty in addition to war. As Sylvia Wynter argues, Colomb’s 1492 voyage was also more complex, for it transformed the European worldview by confirming the universal habitability of the earth: “In the wake of Columbus’ voyage across the Atlantic some half a century after the Portuguese rounded the Cape, it was the same recognition of the earth’s homogeneity that was to strike his contemporaries most vividly41”. Bringing the Americas into view for Europe, added to the experience of traveling to Africa, produced the conceptual possibility of imagining the universal human from the perspective of Europe and also inaugurated a historical progression of colonial violence and dispossession that would divide the world order. In this sense, Colomb, as a historical figure and symbol, can be deployed for thinking in multiple, imbricated, and even conflicting directions.

• 42 According to René Hénane, the Buteo platypterus rivieri is also knowns as the “manger-poulet.” See (...)
• 43 See Herbert A. Raffaele, A Guide to the Birds of Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, Princeton Univ (...)

22When the menfenil is considered in both Césaire’s and Lam’s work, some doubt arises about whether the bird is a hawk or a falcon. While there is quite a bit of variation among Césaire scholars annotating this bird, there seems to be a consensus among those scholars with strong local vernacular knowledge that Césaire refers to the Buteo platypterus rivieri, a broad-winged hawk42. But this bird resembles the Falco columbarius (merlin in English, épervier in French) which only inhabits the Caribbean in the winter (and eats doves and pigeons). The Falco columbarius has triangular falcon wings, but both birds are predominantly brown with some white in coloring, and from a distance with wings outstretched, they would be easily confusable43. The épervier is also present in the Cahier however, and it is unlikely that Césaire referred to it with “menfenil,” even if it would be the true opposite of the dove as a predator of doves. Furthermore, while the Buteo hawk is a relative of the eagle, it is significantly smaller than the eagle. While there may be a proximity between the eagle used as a symbol in Nazi Germany and that which is also used as a national symbol in the United States and Mexico, the “menfenil” is a different raptor altogether.

• 44 While some Césaire translators, including Cabrera, have chosen not to translate “menfenil” and use (...)
• 45 Jourdain said that the “mansfenil” was the Falco spaverius (or sparrow hawk), which seems to deviat (...)

23Another complication can be found in the spelling of “menfenil.” “Menfenil” appears to be sui generis to Césaire, except in Lam’s own follow up usage. The spelling in regular use is “mansfenil”. Furthermore, the “mansfenil” is also known as the “malfini”44. Why then would Césaire opt not to use “mansfenil” or “malfini” in the case of the Cahier and the “Colombes et menfenil” title? I have the following hypothesis: Césaire does not evoke the “bad ending” of the “malfini” in this image of the raptor, or at least not exclusively. Instead, he forwards the mansfenil/malfini as “menfenil” to intervene in this bird of prey as an archetype. Elodie Jourdain notes that “fenil” in “mansfenil” derives from “phoenix”45. And the Latin prefix “mens” refers to thinking and intelligence. Even if “menfenil” and “mansfenil” are close, Césaire appears to have chosen his own spelling of the word, and he employs it several times instead of other obvious options; and Lam chose to follow his usage. It seems to me that it would be worth considering, in addition to which bird he means, what the significance may be of his particular choice for naming this bird. In my reading, “menfenil” proposes something beyond the Buteo: something like phoenix thought or phoenix intelligence, or the possibility of thinking rebirth out of death, or more figuratively, out of mourning, a meaning that itself offers a new archetype, positioning this figure that is more than a hawk closer to the colombe’s function of spiritual rebirth than one might imagine from a more representational reading. Césaire’s poetics take us to a place where “colombe” and “menfenil” may both be themselves and something more than what they usually symbolize as archetypes.

• 46 Aimé Césaire, “Cahier d’un retour au pays natal,” Volontés, n° 20, 1939, p. 39.
• 47 Ibid., p. 33.
• 48 Ibid., p. 37.

24A look at the context for Césaire’s usage of “menfenil” expands my reading that the “menfenil” functions as an archetype renovated in meaning through Césaire’s poetic choices. The figure appears in a stand-alone verse of the Cahier that reads: “Mon étoile maintenant, le menfenil funèbre46”. Here, the bird of prey becomes further detached from its physical reference as a hawk through its personification as a guiding star, or an orientation. In its description as “funèbre” it also becomes associated, like the mourning dove, with a mourning ritual (the funeral). The image here also calls up Toussaint L’Ouverture’s death from the earlier stanza that begins with “Ce qui est à moi aussi : une petite cellule dans le Jura”. In this earlier stanza, Césaire also reconfigures the darkness usually associated with death by proposing L’Ouverture’s death as white: “c’est un homme seul qui défie les cris blancs de la mort blanche47”. But the mourning aspect of the “menfenil” also pertains to the history of slavery evoked in many parts of the poem, including those references to the sounds of the terror of the enslaving ship several stanzas before the introduction of this bird of prey: “J’entends de la cale monter les malédictions enchaînées, les hoquètements des mourants, le bruit d’un qu’on jette à la mer48…”. The menfenil of the Cahier is poised to mourn as much as to prey on the dead as a figure that has fused with a star: the very light, but of the night, required for mourning.

• 49 I am drawing here on Audre Lorde’s suggestion that poetry has the potential to reformulate the very (...)

25As a guide for the possibilities of rebirth and transformation the poem goes on to enact, the menfenil serves as a “mens-phoenix” image for thinking out of the ashes of conquest and oppression, material and figurative. The kind of phoenix-thought I refer to emerges several stanzas later in a series of anticolonial and antiviolent affirmations that revise negations imposed onto those colonized and conquered from European perspectives aligned with conquest. This series persists with some variation in future revisions of the poem. The first Cahier’s version of this series, however, the one Lam met in Martinique and illustrated in translation, may more clearly express the ideas to which opposing values may be ascribed depending on the “light” of value that illuminates them, that of modernity-as-conquest or the nonviolent guiding light that restores the ceremony of the human-in-the-world49.

• 51 See Irele, p. 246-247 for commentary connecting this section of the poem and the introduction of th (...)

26The cheers are for not inventing, not conquering, not taming, not being responsible for carrying out the kinds of death and destruction that are born of imperial domination. Whereas even among peoples who have been conquered, those individuals often glorified on the scale of value that exults conquest are those who exceptionally enact the values of conquest. Césaire’s “Eia”, readable from an oppositional scale, lifts up instead all of those who would not be valued by the colonizers, those who do not participate in the colonial ruse that symbolically makes doves out of rapacious conquerors and renders those they prey on as rapacious hawks. In this part of the poem that is set up by the menfenil as a guiding star, the poetic subject experiences a shift in consciousness that turns the values of conquest around and creates the possibility of formulating pride even out of the (racialized) judgments hurled by those who glorify conquest as modernity and progress51. The Césairian menfenil as a figure of phoenix-thinking guides the rewriting of the self-in-community of this poem. Césaire innovates in his employment of the bird of prey as “menfenil” in a manner akin to his rewriting of Blackness as “négritude” to convey a new and resistant Black consciousness before the forces of anti-Blackness. As bird of prey, the “menfenil” devours the values of conquest delivering their downfall (malfini). The “menfenil” as funèbre and a guiding star may also alight power-in-mourning towards rebirth, igniting the power of phoenix-thinking embedded in the name. Césaire thus follows the hawk as menfenil precisely to reformulate the values of non-conquest in the “ceux qui” series.

• 54 Elegguá’s presence is also central to the Afro-diasporic aesthetic tradition of performatively inte (...)
• 55 It is no coincidence then that Césaire would figure Eshu, another version of this orisha, in his re (...)

32If the horse is the mounted subject possessed in this image, he is taken over by both Ogún and Elegguá. The horse-bull’s tail has a face that is identical to that of the baby figure just below the image’s dove-like figure, and both faces approximate Lam’s other images of Elegguá (also known as Legba and Eshu), the trickster orisha who is responsible for communication between the human and spirit realms, and the possibility of cleansing or renewal54. Elegguá’s presence as both gestating baby and tail-end may very well indicate the healing property of the painting, but it also references its transformative intentionality55. The baby Elegguá is gestating from a small pair of breasts on the dove-hawk figure. Lam’s illustration adds the mounting, or possession, by Ogún and Elegguá to Césaire’s work on the dove and the menfenil, presenting all the figures together as guides of an embattled transformation.

• 56 This painting is currently held in a private collection in New York. It has also appeared in the fo (...)

33Lam’s 1947 painting, “Menfenil,” directly follows Césaire’s shift of the hawk’s name56. The painting appears horizontally, as if a vertical image has been turned on its side. In it we have two crossed birds, each bird’s head on each side, one left, one right, and four wings total appear visible. Whereas the Elegguá heads of each bird in the figure are white, one pair of wings is also light and the other pair (belonging to the bird facing left) is dark. Importantly, these are not wings like the Buteo’s on either side: they crease into the triangular shape of the falcon family rather than curving like the broad winged hawk. Perhaps, Lam’s “menfenil” may be even less representational than Césaire’s, as it deviates here from the form of the mansfenil/malfini. There is also one pair of breasts on the figure with dark wings, recalling the breasts on the menfenil-star and dove-hawk in the Cahier illustrations.

• 57 Paget Henry, op. cit., p. 24.

34Two more wingless shadowy figures also appear within the doubled-menfenil, one horned and faceless but with a single breast, evoking a devil or demon. The other figure has an obscured face, like that of a spirit. The multiplicity of images and the meeting and togetherness of white and dark, demonstrate the contiguity of opposites. The total of four figures together may suggest what Paget Henry has identified as the “four world model of existence” found in many African cosmologies that position “the spirit world as the fourth and most important world in this model of existence”57. The coexisting presence of these four figures, in the singularly named painting seems to offer a pathway for the work of the menfenil as phoenix thinking. The horizontal direction of the painting is important for this practice of thought, for if it were turned vertically on either side, a hierarchy would emerge that would value one of the Elegguá-birds over the other and raise up either the spirit or the devil-demon and turn the other upside down, figuring the hierarchical workings of oppositional structures of value. But the horizontal choice inverts the hierarchical tendency that would proceed from a vertical version of this painting. Instead, we may see Lam proposing the inversion of hierarchies and the reformulation of structures of thought. The effect is not a reversal of the binaries of value (including racialized value) encoded into the values of conquest observable in the Western episteme. Rather, the painting seems to propose a horizontal inversion of the vertical propensity to hierarchy in value. If Lam’s “menfenil” is an avenging figure (to recall Fouchet’s notion), it avenges verticality and hierarchy itself, refusing to choose between, and refusing to separate or order white and dark, spirit or demon. In light of this painting, if we return to the oppositionality in “colombes et menfenil,” we might consider emphasizing, with Lam, the and of horizontality rather than the vertical, or hierarchical sense of the binary also embedded in the figures.

• 58 This painting is currently held in the Museu Coleção Berardo, in Lisboa (since 1997). It has appear (...)
• 59 Odette Casamayor-Cisneros notes that in her unpublished interview with Helena Holzer Benítez, she v (...)
• 60 Lydia Cabrera, Vocabulario Congo (El Bantu que se habla en Cuba), Ediciones Universal, 2001, p. 292 (...)
• 61 Available, https://en.museuberardo.pt/collection/works/606.

35Lam’s “colombe” paintings also intervene in the symbolic value of the dove. “Lunguanda Yembe” (Colombe lunaire, in French) (1950), like the “Menfenil” painting, has a singular title and consists of a multi-figure image58. This painting, along with several other paintings by Lam, was named by Lydia Cabrera.59 Cabrera also produced a dictionary of the Congo language as it was spoken in Cuba, preserved through the Palo Monte spiritual practice and other practices of African cultural continuity. In the Congo language dictionary that Cabrera also produced, “lungonda,” which is very close to the painting’s name of “lunguanda” appears as the name for “luna” (“lune” in French, and “moon” in English) and “yembe” appears as the name for “paloma”. Recall that in Spanish, a dove and a pigeon are both palomas, and that it is their types and colors that differentiate them. There is also a Congo word for a white paloma, or dove, listed in this dictionary. It is “yembe diampembeo wampembe60”. According to the online note on this painting at the Museu Coleção Berardo, Lam had called it “colombe lunaire” before Lydia Cabrera renamed it61.

• 62 Herzberg tells us that Lam was a devotee of Changó in his youth. See Herzberg, “Wifredo Lam”, op. c (...)
• 63 Aimé Césaire, Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, op. cit., p. 51.

36In this painting Lam intervenes in the symbolic force of the white dove by highlighting other variations of the dove, since the dove in “Lunguanda Yembe” is grey. It also has the face Lam paints as Elegguá, and one of its wings opens up onto a double-sided spear, the spear wielded by Changó, the orisha ruler of thunder who is also a warrior62. This colombe or “yembe” is contorted, in an inverted position, and weighed down by the force of Changó’s weapon. The spear appears to keep the contorted colombe in place, unfree, and unable to fly away. The spear also almost touches what approximates a torso and a mantle made by folded arms, including the presence of one hand with long fingers on it. There is also a dark shadow figure behind the colombe, and from it extend chords in red and grey that appear to tie it up, further forcing it into place. These chords recall Césaire’s evocation of the dove in the Cahier’s finale, which follows an abstract image of strangling by a noose of stars: “Puis, m’étranglant de ton lasso d’étoiles/ monte Colombe63”. In this rendition of a darker Elegguá-colombe, there is a struggle keeping it from rising to its purpose, one that recalls the conflict out of which Césaire invokes the dove.

• 64 This painting has appeared in the exhibition, Opere recenti di Lam, 1959, Milano, Galleria Pagani d (...)
• 65 See Herbert Raffaele, op. cit., p. 34-35. When some Césaire scholars have assumed that the “menfeni (...)

38In “La colombe noire” (1959) the eponymous black dove figure has a face that is somewhere between the enlarged dove-hawk in Lam’s 1943 illustration of Césaire’s poetry and his prototypical rendition of Elegguá64. While this dove has the horns and eyes of many of Lam’s other Elegguá figures, its large open mouth deviates from them. The roundness and largeness of its face also recalls the 1943 dove-hawk from the Retorno illustration. In this figure, the wings appear separated from the bird, connected to its head. In fact, the separated wings seem to figure another bird altogether, as there seems to be a pointed beak at their center with an eye on it, suggesting the side of a bird’s face. This other bird holding up the black dove is different from the menfenil in earlier paintings, however. This one bears a striking resemblance to the Fregata magnificens, or magnificent frigate, whose males are predominantly black, which is also found throughout the Caribbean and as far east as Cape Verde.65 This seabird has an extensive wingspan and feeds on prey stolen from other seabirds. In this painting, the Fregata appears to be carrying away the black dove from a latticework of spikes, and these spikes recall the chords tying up the dove in “Lunguanda Yembe“ and the strangling noose of stars that precede the introduction of the dove in the Cahier. Here, the dove is free from the structure, but it is attached to the Fregata. The painting is from the same year that began on January 1 with the revolutionary guerrilla movement led by Fidel Castro taking power over the Cuban state and forming a new revolutionary state after the flight of the dictator, Fulgencio Batista. The colombe noire has an ambivalent expression, suggesting a more complex sentiment than victory. But the political transformation seems key to the doubling of birds in this particular image.

• 66 Navarro, “Para leer a Lam”, op. cit., p. 280.
• 67 Robert Farris Thompson, Flash of the Spirit: African And Afro-American Art and Philosophy, Vintage, (...)
• 68 Navarro, “Para leer a Lam”, op. cit., p. 287.
• 69 I have Paloma Duong to thank for the reference to this famous moment in Cuban revolutionary history (...)
• 70 Lydia Cabrera, Vocabulario Congo, op. cit., p. 292.

39Desiderio Navarro has related the repeating images of birds connected to human heads in Lam’s paintings to the Yoruba myth of the eyie ororo or “the bird of the head”, in dialogue with Robert Farris Thompson66. Thompson explains that for the Yoruba people this bird is placed by God “in the head of man or woman at birth as the emblem of the mind. The image of the descent of the bird of mind fuses with the image of the coming down of God’s àshe in feathered form67.” This bird of the mind, according to Thompson, is also regularly represented as white. The eyie ororo as an image of birth connects to the symbolism of the (white) dove in Christianity. In La colombe noire Lam practices what Navarro calls his tendency to ”rhyme visually“ between humans, nature, and myth, by transforming the eyie ororo motif into an image of an Elegguá-black dove with another black bird perched on it, or even carrying it away68. The “rhyme” at work here also calls forth the famous speech of Fidel Castro’s on January 8, 1959 at none other than the Columbia barracks in Havana, in which, as if magically, a white dove perched on his shoulder, and two others joined him at his side69. In Lam’s rendition, however, the dove and the bird perched on it are both black, drawing attention to the underrepresented colombe noire, “yembe diandombi” in Congo70. Lam’s proposal in this painting, an abstract colombe noire that is also attached to a figure like a frigate, offers the eyie ororo transformed with the help of Elegguá, in black.