Alas you will die.

I recall a November day, he was not six months old and the master came into the shack…..

And this man was speculating over my son’s cradle, a slavedriver’s cradle.

MOTHER

Alas you will die.

REBEL

Killed….. I killed him with my own hands……

Yes, a fecund and copious death…….

It was night. We crawled through the sugarcane.

The cutlasses were chortling at the stars, but we didn’t care about the stars.

The cane slashed our faces with streams of green blades.

MOTHER

I had dreamed of a son who would close his mother’s eyes.

REBEL

I chose to open my child’s eyes to another sun.

MOTHER

……O my son…… an evil and pernicious death.

REBEL

Mother, a verdant and sumptuous death.

MOTHER

From too much hate.

REBEL

From too much love.

Spare me, I’m choking from your shackles, bleeding from your wounds.

REBEL

And the world does not spare me…… There is not in the world one single lynched bastard, one poor tortured man, in whom I am not also murdered and humiliated.

MOTHER

God in Heaven, deliver him!

REBEL

My heart, you will not deliver me of my memories……

It was a November night……

And suddenly clamors lit up the silence,

we had leapt, we the slaves, we the manure, we the beasts with patient hooves.

We were running like lunatics, fiery shots broke out……… We were striking. Sweat and blood cooled us off. We were striking amidst the screams and the screams became more strident and a great clamor rose toward the east, the outbuildings were burning and the flames sweetly splashed our cheeks.

Then came the attack on the master’s house.

They were shooting from the windows.

We forced the doors.

The master’s bedroom was wide open. The Master’s bedroom was brilliantly lit, and the master was there, very calm…… and all of us stopped….. he was the master……. I entered. It’s you, he said, very calmly…… Its me, it was indeed me, I told him, the good slave, the faithful slave, the slave slave, and suddenly my eyes were two cockroaches frightened on a rainy day…….. I struck, the blood spurted, it is the only baptism that today I remember.

———

Source: Lyric And Dramatic Poetry. by Aime Cesaire.

Translated by Clayton Eshelman & Annette Gail Smith

Dedicated to Raj Kumar’s Mother