Variations on Verrition: (Re)turning to the Enigmatic Final Word of Aimé Césaire's Cahier d'un retour au pays natal

Abstract

Abstract Besides the neologism négritude, the term verrition, a hapax legomenon and the final word of Aimé Césaire's celebrated long poem Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (1939–56), is perhaps the most contested and ambiguous signifier in the poet's corpus. This essay reconsiders the much-debated question of verrition and its poiesis. Contra a long-standing tenet of Césaire criticism—that verrition was a pure neologism—and further to René Hénane (Glossaire des termes rares [2004]) and Carrie Noland (Voices of Negritude [2015]), I identify several textual antecedents to and possible sources of this supposed neologism that have implications for how we read the final stanza of the Cahier. Critical focus on Césairean neology has had a somewhat obfuscatory effect on thinking through subtler dimensions of Césaire's decolonial poetics, especially how the poet frequently reinvests and rearticulates existing terms in French, redirecting them toward antiracist and anticolonial ends.