Myth of Arrival

I took a wonderful Shakespeare course my last semester of graduate school and one of the text we examined was The Tempest. One direction of scholarship that proved extremely interesting was the re-examination of colonial literature not from the point of view of the colonizer but the colonized. In other words, what does literature written at a time when various empires were expanding over the planet show us about the mind-set, the attitudes and apprehensions of the invading powers trying to re-shape various indigenous peoples into their own images? As Caliban says, You taught me language, and my profit on 't / Is I know how to curse. The red plague rid you / For learning me your language!¹

I have been forced to approach much of Baudelaire's poetry in this fashion. He is, of course, like all of us, a product of his culture. That is, Paris, France, in the 1840s and 1850s. Charles was middle-class, taken to living off the allowance his mother gave him and fond of prostitutes and absinthe. That is the popular mythology that surrounds him. What this means is he developed various venereal diseases that stayed with him his entire adult life and which he apparently passed onto all his lovers.

But in many of his poems there is a figure of a certain woman, who Louis Simpson refers to as "quadroon," or octoroon, a person having one-quarter African ancestry, named Jeanne Duval.² It has been the tendency of several of the critical essays I have read so far (see: Ward, 2001; de Jonge, 1976; Piaget Shanks, 1974) to eroticse Duval as much as Baudelaire does. That is, they take the poem on face value without bothering to question what the poet was attempting to do.

For example, in Parfum Exotique, what is curious to me is not so much that from a scent of exotic fragrance brings forth all these images to the speaker of the poem, Proust does the same thing but for 600 pages, but what those images are. The speaker talks of a sun-drenched, lazy island where outlandish trees grow and the population is both submissive and sexually libidinous.

That this idea of Primitivism is still in art speaks volumes. That is that "primitive peoples" (read: non-Western, white and middle class) contain some sort of destructive force that is continually lurking on the outside of our (read: male) understanding, particularly ecstasy, spiritual punishment and/or unsuppressed urges of violence or sexuality. This idea had been sweeping through Paris at the time of Baudelaire, with Paul Gauguin's paintings of the Tahiti and the South Pacific, featuring nude, highly sexual women in various "native" poses. However, like many other things, Primitivism is a racist construct, developed by outside observers searching for solutions to various problems of their own society. The original poem reads as follows:

Quand, les deux yeux fermés, en un soir chaud d'automne,
Je respire l'odeur de ton sein chaleureux,
Je vois se dérouler des rivages heureux
Qu'éblouissent les feux d'un soleil monotone;

Une île paresseuse où la nature donne
Des arbres singuliers et des fruits savoureux;
Des hommes dont le corps est mince et vigoureux,
Et des femmes dont l'oeil par sa franchise étonne.

Guidé par ton odeur vers de charmants climats,
Je vois un port rempli de voiles et de mâts
Encor tout fatigués par la vague marine,

Pendant que le parfum des verts tamariniers,
Qui circule dans l'air et m'enfle la narine,
Se mêle dans mon âme au chant des mariniers.

That Baudelaire would find the Pacific, or the Caribbean or Africa exotic is less shocking than if he somehow would have had the creativity and humanity not to. Perhaps what this shows to us is how quickly what titillates changes. What was once seen as forbidden or taboo is now common. Common is not a bad thing, it means we are no longer scandalized by the "Other." The sonnet I would love to read would be Jeanne Duval's reply to Baudelaire, After giving me the clap, I lay next/ to your pasty flesh and smell Paris'/ sewer system in one fetid breath … but sadly, we do not have that.

Bewitching, on an autumn night with eyes
closed I breathe in the musk of your breasts, see
far off shores, atolls, all bright and happy
under a dazzling, endless sunrise.

Lazy island, where Nature breeds countless
wondrous trees and fruits of weird delight,
and whose men, with their lithe bodies, invite
women, whose eyes flash with lewd directness.

Lured by your scent to an isle so charming,
I see a port full of sail, mast, rigging
all still weary from the ocean's furies

while the tamarind trees breathe their flavor
to please my senses with greedy pleasure,
mingled with sailor's sea-songs and chanteys.

Notes in Translation:

For those who are not familiar with the terms, Tamarind trees are a tropical Asian evergreen tree, having pale yellow flowers and long seed pods. Chantey is a song sung by sailors to the rhythm of their movements while working.

1. This line alone from The Tempest has been interpreted, among many things, as Shakespeare speaking on behalf of the enslaved peoples Britain had conquered at a time when they had no voice at all. [back]
2. Simpson, Louis. Modern Poets of France: a bilingual anthology. Story Line Press (1997) page 381 [back]

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 5th, 2006 at 1:14 pm and is filed under Forms, Writing Poetry, French Translations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.