The Ironic Republic
Saint-John Perse was born in the Caribbean during the colonial era to a family that belonged to the privileged ruling class. He identified with the class that had come over from France. Yet, Derek Walcott, in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, The Antilles: Fragments of an Epic Memory, says that it is impossible to watch the palm fronds at dawn in the Caribbean without thinking of Saint-John Perse.
“To celebrate Perse, we might be told, is to celebrate the old plantation system, to celebrate the beque or plantation rider, verandahs and mulatto servants, a white French language in a white pith helmet, to celebrate a rhetoric of patronage and hauteur; and even if Perse denied his origins, great writers often have this folly of trying to smother their source, we cannot deny him any more than we can the African Aime Cesaire. This is not accommodation, this is the ironic republic that is poetry, since, when I see cabbage palms moving their fronds at sunrise, I think they are reciting Perse.” — Derek Walcott, The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory
Walcott’s justification for claiming back Perse for the Caribbean is that poetry is the Ironic Republic.
Poetry’s relationship with politics is fraught and complicated. Politics is ever-changing, and poetry too. But at the same time, a poem is also time frozen in a body of words set in a particular order. Change one word and you change the whole poem. So perhaps frozen is not the correct word. It is like a DNA sequence. Exchange two nucleotides and you change the function of the whole gene. Poetry is alive in that way but it is not just a string of words.
Politics comes and goes but, but poetry is forever. Albert Einstein, when turning down the presidency of Israel, famously said, “Politics is for today, but an equation is for eternity.” Perse, who was a career diplomat, could have said the same about poetry’s relationship to politics.
It is not an accident that Saint-John Perse refers to Einstein in his acceptance speech at the Nobel Prize acceptance ceremony. The poet and the scientist are both exploring the same abyss, he says. The poet bears testament to their time but they are also exiles.
“I shall live in my name,” was your answer to the questionnaire of the port-authority. And at the money-changer’s you have nothing to show but that which is suspect.
Like those great iron coinages laid bare by lightning.
[<< J’habiterai mon nom>>, fut ta réponse aux questionnaires du port. Et sur les tables du changeur, tu n’as rien que de trouble à produire,
Comme ces grandes monnaies de fer exhumées par la foudre.’] — Saint-John Perse, Exile
Or they are forever journeying through the layers of language and psyche to that land where there is no hate. But by the very nature of his exploration, the poet is alone in that snow-covered landscape that lies far beyond the river that no one has dared to cross. But in journeying to that unknown faraway land the poet not only discovers a new country but also his/her ‘unfordable’ soul.
… And it was at morning, beneath the purest of wordforms, a beautiful country without hatred or meanness, a place of grace and of mercy for the ascension of the unfailing presages of the mind;
[< . . . Et ce fut au matin, sous le plus pur vocable, un beau pays sans haine ni lésine, un lieu de grâce et de merci pour la montée des sûrs présages de l’esprit;] — Saint-John Perse, Exile
Where does this journey lead to? To me the answer is glaringly simple: The Ironic Republic.
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