Sep 13, 2020
Lila Azam Zanganeh on her selection:
Césaire speaks to me, a French-born Iranian, as the poet of migration and metissage, but also as the poet of longing for a home destroyed out of recognition. Césaire is the rare political poet who is an alchemist in his own right—Rimbaud reborn in Martinique, a mere quarter of a century after his death. He is also, in my eyes, the great poet of agency, and of promise: "there is room for all at the meeting-place of conquest," he writes in Return to My Native Land. "We know now... that every star falls at our command from the sky to the earth without limit." Exit old ghosts.
Return to My Native Land, trans. Anna Bostock and John Berger at Archipelago Books
"Shift of Currents" by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0