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Lost Body
A collection of ten poems Césaire published in 1949, in an edition including thirty-two etchings by Picasso.
132 pages, Paperback
Published September 17, 1986
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397 people want to read
About the author
Aimé Césaire
120 books633 followersMartinique-born poet, playwright, and politician Aimé Fernand Césaire contributed to the development of the concept of negritude; his primarily surrealist works include
The Miracle Weapons
(1946) and
A Tempest
(1969).
A francophone author of African descent. His books of include Lost Body, with illustrations by Pablo Picasso, Aimé Césaire: The Collected Poetry, and Return to My Native Land. He is also the author of Discourse on Colonialism, a book of essays which has become a classic text of French political literature and helped establish the literary and ideological movement Negritude, a term Césaire defined as “the simple recognition of the fact that one is black, the acceptance of this fact and of our destiny as blacks, of our history and culture.” Césaire is a recipient of the International Nâzim Hikmet Poetry Award, the second winner in its history. He served as Mayor of Fort-de-France as a member of the Communist Party, and later quit the party to establish his Martinique Independent Revolution Party. He was deeply involved in the struggle for French West Indian rights and served as the deputy to the French National Assembly. He retired from politics in 1993. Césaire died in Martinique.
A francophone author of African descent. His books of include Lost Body, with illustrations by Pablo Picasso, Aimé Césaire: The Collected Poetry, and Return to My Native Land. He is also the author of Discourse on Colonialism, a book of essays which has become a classic text of French political literature and helped establish the literary and ideological movement Negritude, a term Césaire defined as “the simple recognition of the fact that one is black, the acceptance of this fact and of our destiny as blacks, of our history and culture.” Césaire is a recipient of the International Nâzim Hikmet Poetry Award, the second winner in its history. He served as Mayor of Fort-de-France as a member of the Communist Party, and later quit the party to establish his Martinique Independent Revolution Party. He was deeply involved in the struggle for French West Indian rights and served as the deputy to the French National Assembly. He retired from politics in 1993. Césaire died in Martinique.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
read-in-2018
March 6, 2018...but I in turn in the air
shall rise a scream so violent
that I shall splatter the whole sky
and with my branches torn to shred
and with the insolent jet of my wounded and solemn bole
I shall command the island to be
From rage and frustration, a call for Martinique to create itself. I was about to write "from the ashes of the colonial era", but in fact Marintique is still a French colony. At least, unlike Puerto Rico they have full political rights and representation in the French Senate.
I'm still a terrible poetry reader, so I've read more about Aimé Césare than by him, and that more essays and manifestos. His work informs the most recent film by Cameroonian director Jean-Pierre Bekolo film, Miraculous Weapons, quite a lot (right down to the title, I believe) so I wanted to delve a little more directly. The Picasso drawings in this edition don't add anything essential in themselves, yet they improve the experience by giving the words more space and a different kind of cadence as they interleave with the simple linework.
January 31, 2018
This book could easily be described as a poetic etymology of Négritude. It is elegiac in its rhythms and elegant simplicity, and Picasso's illustrations function perfectly with the text. Any fan of Aimé Césaire will recognize the difference in his voice here, adjusted to an elemental task. A glorious book.
January 6, 2026
I started 2025 with Aimé Césaire's Discourse on Colonialism, so it felt appropriate to start this year with his 1950 collection of poetry, Corps Perdu (Lost Body). Published in 1950 and illustrated by Pablo Picasso, the beautiful collection deals with themes of identity, loss and alienation, of those people of African descent who found themselves thrust against their wills into slavery and forced labor under colonial systems, not only in Africa but in Europe and across the Americas.
Picasso's drawings connect Césaire's subjects with the Earth. They are presented with leaves, stamens, pistils, flowers, underscoring certain values and characteristics - endurance, serenity, fertility, growth, non-aggression, etc. "What happens to a dream deferred?", Langston Hughes asks. While Césaire asks "What happens to a body lost?" Is it to be found again? Once lost, can it be reclaimed?
Picasso's drawings connect Césaire's subjects with the Earth. They are presented with leaves, stamens, pistils, flowers, underscoring certain values and characteristics - endurance, serenity, fertility, growth, non-aggression, etc. "What happens to a dream deferred?", Langston Hughes asks. While Césaire asks "What happens to a body lost?" Is it to be found again? Once lost, can it be reclaimed?
January 20, 2022
Word
from myself
to myself
outside any constellation
clenched in my hands only
the rare hiccup of an ultimate raving spasm
keep vibrating word
longer wider keep vibrating
in tighter and tighter waves
in a lasso to catch me
in a rope to hang me
and let me be nailed by all the arrows
and their bitterest curare
to the beautiful centre stake of very cool stars
vibrate
vibrate you very essence of the dark
in a wing in a throat from so much perishing
the word nigger
emerged fully armed from the howling
of a poisonous flower
the word nigger
all filthy parasites
the word nigger
loaded with roaming bandits
with screaming mothers
crying children
the word nigger
a sizzling of flesh and horny matter
burning, acrid
the word nigger
like the sun bleeding from its claw
onto the sidewalk of clouds
the word nigger
like the last laugh calved by innocence
between the tiger's fangs
and as the word sun is a ringing of bullets
and the word night a ripping of taffeta
the word nigger
from the thunder of a summer
* * *
Who Then, Who Then . . .
needed a true sleep
blond as an awakening
a city escaping into the jungle or the sand
sniffed out nocturnal sniffed out
needed a nonritualistic god or you
or an era of millet and enterprise
and if I needed an island
Borneo Sumatra Maldives Laccadives
if I needed a sandalwood-scented Timor
or Moluccas Ternate Tidore
or Celebes or Ceylon
who in this vast magician night
would comb the ebb and the flow
with the teeth of a triumphant comb
and if I needed sun
or rain or blood
the cordial of an instant of an invented dawn
an unconfessed continent
a well a lizard a dream
an unstunted reverie
its memory pulmonic and its heart in its hand
and if I needed a wave of a mizzen
or the phosphorescent grip
of an eternal scar
who then
who then
among the winds would comb
with a triumphant comb a vapor of changeable climates
who then
who then
O full-grown wild condemned to sort out
the grain of a clarity
who skillfully through dog-or-wolf dusk moves me forward
intent upon neatly confusing the account
* * *
Elegy
The hibiscus that is nothing other than a burst eye
from which hands the thread of a long gaze the trumpets of the chalice vines
the huge black sabers of flamboyants the twilight that is an ever jingling bunch of keys
the Arecas that are nonchalant suns never setting because pierced through and through by a pin which the addlebrained lands
never hesitate to jab all the way in
to their hearts the terrifying souklyans Orion
the ecstatic butterfly that magical pollens
crucified on the gate of trembling nights
the beautiful black curls of canafistulas that are very proud
mulatto women whose necks tremble a bit under the guillotine
and do not be surprised if at night I moan more heavily
or if my hands strangle more secretly
it is the herd of old sufferings which toward my smell
black and red
scolopendra-like
stretches its head and with the still soft and clumsy
insistence of its muzzle
searches more deeply for my heart
then it is no use for me to press my heart against yours
nor to lose myself in the foliage of your arms
the herd finds it
and very solemnly
in a manner always new
licks it
amorously
until the first blood savagely appears
on the abrupt open claws of
DISASTER
* * *
Presence
a whole May of canafistulas
on the chest of pure hiccup
of an island adulterous to its site
flesh which having possessed itself harvests its grape self
O slow among the dacites
a pinch of birds fanned by a wind
in which the cataracts of time pass blended
the sheer profusion of a rare miracle
in the ever credulous storm
of a nonevasive season
* * *
Forloining
The houses out here at the foot of the mountains
are not even as well arranges as hobnailed boots
the trees are explosions whose last spark
goes out washing over my hands which tremble a little
from now on I carry within me
the sheath torn from a tall palm tree
like the day would be without the memory of you
the raw dodder silk
which ensnares the back of the site
in the utterly complete way that despair does
monstrous solitary ceiba trees which
fro this day on I would resemble stripped of the leaves of my love
I drift between a swell and swathes formed by
the speech tumult of albizzias
in front of me is an extraordinary peasant
what the peasant sings is a tale
about cane cutters
woosh the cane cutter
grabs the long-haired lady
hacks her into three pieces
woosh the cane cutter
burried not the maiden
he hacks her up in pieces
tosses them behind him
woosh the can cutter
sings the peasant and toward a cutlass evening proceeds without anger
the disheveled hair of the long-haired lady makes rivulets of light
so sings the peasant
There are a whole lot of things whose names I do not know
and I'd like to tell you about them
in the sky your hair solemnly draws away
kinds of rain one no longer sees
nus Saint Elmo's fire
sun lames whispered nights
cathedrals too
which are the carcasses of large gnawed horses
spat by the sea from far away
but still worshipped by people
a whole lot of forgotten things
a hole lot of dreamed things
while the two of us Distant-one-my-inattentive-one
the two of us
enter the never faded landscape
more powerful than a hundred thousand ruttings
* * *
Lost Body
I who everything better than a monsoon
I who open chest
I who Laelaps
I who bleat better than a cloaca
I who outside the musical scale
I who Zambezi or frantic or rhombos or cannibal
I would like to be more and more humble and more lowly
always more serious without vertigo or vestige
to the point of losing myself falling
into the live semolina of a well-opened earth
Outside in lieu of atmosphere there'd be a beautiful haze no dirt in it
each drop of water forming a sun there
whose name the same for all things
would be DELICIOUS TOTAL ENCOUNTER
so that one would no longer know what goes by
- a star or a hope
or a petal from the flamboyant tree
or an underwater retreat
raced across by the flaming torches of aurelian jellyfish
Then I imagine life would flood my whole being
better still I would feel it touching me or biting me
lying down I would see the finally free odors come to me
like merciful hands
finding their way
to sway their long hair in me
longer than this past that I cannot reach.
Things stand back make room among you
room for my repose carrying in waves
my frightening crest of anchor-like roots
looking for a place to take hold
Things I probe I probe
me the street-porter I am root-porter
and I bear down and I force and I arcane
Ah who leads me back toward the harpoons
I hiss yes I hiss very ancient things
as serpents do as do cavernous things
I whoa lie down wind
and against my unstable and fresh muzzle
against my eroded face
press your cold face of ravaged laughter
The wind alas I will continue to hear it
nigger nigger nigger from the depths
of the timeless sky
a little less loud than today
but still too loud
and this crazed howling of dogs and horses
which it thrusts at our forever fugitive heels
but I in turn in the air
shall rise a scream so violent
that I shall splatter the whole sky
and with my branches torn to shred
and with the insolent jet of my wounded and solemn bole
* * *
Your Portrait
I say river corrosive
kiss of guts
river gash enormous embrace
in the smallest swamps
forced water frantic at the sluice gates
for with fresh tears
I built you into a river
poisonous
which toward the flowering shores of the sea
tears open the slash of my manchineel course
I say river
like one says patient regal crocodile
quick to snap out of its dream
river
like royal anaconda
inventor of the sudden flick
river
jet alone like from the depths of nightmare
the baldest Pelee of mountains.
River
to which all is permitted
above all wash away my banks
widen me
that an ear I might ausculate the new coralline heart of the tides
and let the whole horizon venture forth
vaster and vaster before me
and take off from your snout
henceforth
* * *
Summons
everything more beautiful
the chancellery of fire
the chancellery of water
a huge somersault of promontories
and stars
a mountain exfoliating into
an orgy of islands and glowing trees
the coldly calm hands of the sun
over the wild head of a destroyed city
everything more beautiful everything more beautiful
including the memory of this world sweeping through
a tepid white gallop muffled by black
like that of a sea bird which forget itself in full flight and glides
on pink legs over sleep
everything more beautiful truly more beautiful
umbel
and terebella
the chancellery of air
the chancellery of water
your eyes a fruit busting its shell on the stroke of midnight
and it no longer is MIDNIGHT
Square conquered Time the conqueror
me I like time time is nocturnal
and when Space galloping sets me up
Time comes back to set me free
Time Time
oh creel without venison summoning me
whole
native
solemn
* * *
Births
Broken
Stagnant water of my face
on our births broken at last
Let me say this:
in the stagnant waters of my face
alone
distant
nocturnal
never
never
will I have been absent
The serpents?
the serpents, we'll drive them away
The monsters?
The monsters - the remorse of all
the says we indulged in
biting us - will lower their breathing
sniffing us.
All the shed blood
we shall lap it up
from it we shall grow like spelt
with more exact dreams
with less divided thoughts
do not blow the dust away
the antivenom shall balance the antique venom in an awesome rose window
do not blow the dust away
everything shall be visible rhythm
and what would we recover?
not even our secret.
Do not blow the dust away
An uncontrollable passion always unbending being that by which everything shall be expanded
there shall be above all carbuncles no less enchantment-
prone than the enchanted tree
nontree tree
yesterday uprooted
and behold
the celestial plowmen are proud having been transformed
oh plowing plowmen
on earth it is replanted
the sky thrusts
it counter-thrusts
nontree tree
beautiful voluminous tree
Within me
from myself
to myself
outside any constellation
clenched in my hands only
the rare hiccup of an ultimate raving spasm
keep vibrating word
I will have luck outside the labyrinth
longer wider keep vibrating
in tighter and tighter waves
in a lasso to catch me
in a rope to hang me
and let me be nailed by all the arrows
and their bitterest curare
to the beautiful centre stake of very cool stars
vibrate
vibrate you very essence of the dark
in a wing in a throat from so much perishing
the word nigger
emerged fully armed from the howling
of a poisonous flower
the word nigger
all filthy parasites
the word nigger
loaded with roaming bandits
with screaming mothers
crying children
the word nigger
a sizzling of flesh and horny matter
burning, acrid
the word nigger
like the sun bleeding from its claw
onto the sidewalk of clouds
the word nigger
like the last laugh calved by innocence
between the tiger's fangs
and as the word sun is a ringing of bullets
and the word night a ripping of taffeta
the word nigger
dense, right?
from the thunder of a summer
appropriated byincredulous liberties
* * *
Who Then, Who Then . . .
And if I needed myself
needed a true sleep
blond as an awakening
a city escaping into the jungle or the sand
sniffed out nocturnal sniffed out
needed a nonritualistic god or you
or an era of millet and enterprise
and if I needed an island
Borneo Sumatra Maldives Laccadives
if I needed a sandalwood-scented Timor
or Moluccas Ternate Tidore
or Celebes or Ceylon
who in this vast magician night
would comb the ebb and the flow
with the teeth of a triumphant comb
and if I needed sun
or rain or blood
the cordial of an instant of an invented dawn
an unconfessed continent
a well a lizard a dream
an unstunted reverie
its memory pulmonic and its heart in its hand
and if I needed a wave of a mizzen
or the phosphorescent grip
of an eternal scar
who then
who then
among the winds would comb
with a triumphant comb a vapor of changeable climates
who then
who then
O full-grown wild condemned to sort out
the grain of a clarity
who skillfully through dog-or-wolf dusk moves me forward
intent upon neatly confusing the account
* * *
Elegy
The hibiscus that is nothing other than a burst eye
from which hands the thread of a long gaze the trumpets of the chalice vines
the huge black sabers of flamboyants the twilight that is an ever jingling bunch of keys
the Arecas that are nonchalant suns never setting because pierced through and through by a pin which the addlebrained lands
never hesitate to jab all the way in
to their hearts the terrifying souklyans Orion
the ecstatic butterfly that magical pollens
crucified on the gate of trembling nights
the beautiful black curls of canafistulas that are very proud
mulatto women whose necks tremble a bit under the guillotine
and do not be surprised if at night I moan more heavily
or if my hands strangle more secretly
it is the herd of old sufferings which toward my smell
black and red
scolopendra-like
stretches its head and with the still soft and clumsy
insistence of its muzzle
searches more deeply for my heart
then it is no use for me to press my heart against yours
nor to lose myself in the foliage of your arms
the herd finds it
and very solemnly
in a manner always new
licks it
amorously
until the first blood savagely appears
on the abrupt open claws of
DISASTER
* * *
Presence
a whole May of canafistulas
on the chest of pure hiccup
of an island adulterous to its site
flesh which having possessed itself harvests its grape self
O slow among the dacites
a pinch of birds fanned by a wind
in which the cataracts of time pass blended
the sheer profusion of a rare miracle
in the ever credulous storm
of a nonevasive season
* * *
Forloining
The houses out here at the foot of the mountains
are not even as well arranges as hobnailed boots
the trees are explosions whose last spark
goes out washing over my hands which tremble a little
from now on I carry within me
the sheath torn from a tall palm tree
like the day would be without the memory of you
the raw dodder silk
which ensnares the back of the site
in the utterly complete way that despair does
monstrous solitary ceiba trees which
fro this day on I would resemble stripped of the leaves of my love
I drift between a swell and swathes formed by
the speech tumult of albizzias
in front of me is an extraordinary peasant
what the peasant sings is a tale
about cane cutters
woosh the cane cutter
grabs the long-haired lady
hacks her into three pieces
woosh the cane cutter
burried not the maiden
he hacks her up in pieces
tosses them behind him
woosh the can cutter
sings the peasant and toward a cutlass evening proceeds without anger
the disheveled hair of the long-haired lady makes rivulets of light
so sings the peasant
There are a whole lot of things whose names I do not know
and I'd like to tell you about them
in the sky your hair solemnly draws away
kinds of rain one no longer sees
nus Saint Elmo's fire
sun lames whispered nights
cathedrals too
which are the carcasses of large gnawed horses
spat by the sea from far away
but still worshipped by people
a whole lot of forgotten things
a hole lot of dreamed things
while the two of us Distant-one-my-inattentive-one
the two of us
enter the never faded landscape
more powerful than a hundred thousand ruttings
* * *
Lost Body
I who Krakatoa
I who everything better than a monsoon
I who open chest
I who Laelaps
I who bleat better than a cloaca
I who outside the musical scale
I who Zambezi or frantic or rhombos or cannibal
I would like to be more and more humble and more lowly
always more serious without vertigo or vestige
to the point of losing myself falling
into the live semolina of a well-opened earth
Outside in lieu of atmosphere there'd be a beautiful haze no dirt in it
each drop of water forming a sun there
whose name the same for all things
would be DELICIOUS TOTAL ENCOUNTER
so that one would no longer know what goes by
- a star or a hope
or a petal from the flamboyant tree
or an underwater retreat
raced across by the flaming torches of aurelian jellyfish
Then I imagine life would flood my whole being
better still I would feel it touching me or biting me
lying down I would see the finally free odors come to me
like merciful hands
finding their way
to sway their long hair in me
longer than this past that I cannot reach.
Things stand back make room among you
room for my repose carrying in waves
my frightening crest of anchor-like roots
looking for a place to take hold
Things I probe I probe
me the street-porter I am root-porter
and I bear down and I force and I arcane
I omphale
Ah who leads me back toward the harpoons
I am very weak
I hiss yes I hiss very ancient things
as serpents do as do cavernous things
I whoa lie down wind
and against my unstable and fresh muzzle
against my eroded face
press your cold face of ravaged laughter
The wind alas I will continue to hear it
nigger nigger nigger from the depths
of the timeless sky
a little less loud than today
but still too loud
and this crazed howling of dogs and horses
which it thrusts at our forever fugitive heels
but I in turn in the air
shall rise a scream so violent
that I shall splatter the whole sky
and with my branches torn to shred
and with the insolent jet of my wounded and solemn bole
I shall command the island to be
* * *
Your Portrait
I say river corrosive
kiss of guts
river gash enormous embrace
in the smallest swamps
forced water frantic at the sluice gates
for with fresh tears
I built you into a river
poisonous
spasmodictriumphant
which toward the flowering shores of the sea
tears open the slash of my manchineel course
I say river
like one says patient regal crocodile
quick to snap out of its dream
river
like royal anaconda
inventor of the sudden flick
river
jet alone like from the depths of nightmare
the baldest Pelee of mountains.
River
to which all is permitted
above all wash away my banks
widen me
that an ear I might ausculate the new coralline heart of the tides
and let the whole horizon venture forth
vaster and vaster before me
and take off from your snout
henceforth
swirlingand liquid
* * *
Summons
everything more beautiful
the chancellery of fire
the chancellery of water
a huge somersault of promontories
and stars
a mountain exfoliating into
an orgy of islands and glowing trees
the coldly calm hands of the sun
over the wild head of a destroyed city
everything more beautiful everything more beautiful
including the memory of this world sweeping through
a tepid white gallop muffled by black
like that of a sea bird which forget itself in full flight and glides
on pink legs over sleep
everything more beautiful truly more beautiful
umbel
and terebella
the chancellery of air
the chancellery of water
your eyes a fruit busting its shell on the stroke of midnight
and it no longer is MIDNIGHT
Square conquered Time the conqueror
me I like time time is nocturnal
and when Space galloping sets me up
Time comes back to set me free
Time Time
oh creel without venison summoning me
whole
native
solemn
* * *
Births
Broken
Stagnant water of my face
on our births broken at last
Let me say this:
in the stagnant waters of my face
alone
distant
nocturnal
never
never
will I have been absent
The serpents?
the serpents, we'll drive them away
The monsters?
The monsters - the remorse of all
the says we indulged in
biting us - will lower their breathing
sniffing us.
All the shed blood
we shall lap it up
from it we shall grow like spelt
with more exact dreams
with less divided thoughts
do not blow the dust away
the antivenom shall balance the antique venom in an awesome rose window
do not blow the dust away
everything shall be visible rhythm
and what would we recover?
not even our secret.
Do not blow the dust away
An uncontrollable passion always unbending being that by which everything shall be expanded
there shall be above all carbuncles no less enchantment-
prone than the enchanted tree
nontree tree
yesterday uprooted
and behold
the celestial plowmen are proud having been transformed
oh plowing plowmen
on earth it is replanted
the sky thrusts
it counter-thrusts
nontree tree
beautiful voluminous tree
day alight on it
a startled bird
December 9, 2007
This is one of the best books by the terrific West Indian poet, and one of the founders of Negritude, Aime Cesaire, an early Surrealist who wrote in French. The remarkable title poem itself makes this book a treasure.
May 25, 2007
fresh mainly for the collaboration with Picasso.
August 1, 2007
Great edition, with Picasso drawings. Beautiful
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews