The Ferrements of poetry: the geopolitical vision of Aimé Césaire’s Cold War poems

Abstract

This article examines the poems collected in Ferrements (1960) – the last collection of poems that Aime Cesaire would publish for another two decades – against the Cold War context of Cesaire’s 1956 separation from Soviet communism. Critics tend to view this collection as either a reflection of Cesaire’s disillusionment with radical politics or a turn away from avant-garde poetry. This article makes the case that the poems of Ferrements are in fact crucial to the development of Cesaire’s political thought in this period of ideological rupture. As this article demonstrates, Cesaire uses the conceptual tools of poetry towards a systematic analysis of the changed geopolitical situation of the global Cold War. The article focuses especially on Cesaire’s extensive use of geographic imagery, his elegies for insurrectionary figures, and congruities between the poetics of Ferrements and the geopolitical stance of non-alignment.