Le Nègre

by Philippe Soupault

"Il est celui qui ne pense à rien parce qu'il n'a rien à penser. Il est celui qui aime le sommeil une fois pour toutes et qui aime mordre la nuit et l'écraser. Il est aussi celui qui marche seul dans l'ombre et le silence.Il avance. Ses pas frappent la terre. Il n'y a plus pour lui que le froid et le chaud, la pluie et le vent. Rien d'autre. La terre tourne. Il avance dans l'air fluide, dans la lumière rose du matin et du soir. Rien d'autre. Qui l'étonne ?Il est né dans un pays où les fleuves ont des milliers de kilomètres, où l'eau roule des cailloux gros comme des têtes, où les orages durent plusieurs semaines, où les lacs qui ont la forme des yeux sont féroces comme les mers, où les nuages sont plus lourds encore que la chaleur, où le feu se propage à la vitesse d'une locomotive."

154 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1927

About the author

Philippe Soupault was a French writer and poet, novelist, critic, and political activist. He took an active role in the Dadaist movement and later founded the Surrealist movement with André Breton. Soupault founded the periodical Littérature together with the writers Breton and Louis Aragon in Paris 1919, which, for many, dates the beginnings of Surrealism. The first book of automatic writing, Les champs magnétiques (1920), was co-authored by Soupault and Breton. After imprisonment by the Nazis in World War II, Soupault traveled to the United States but subsequently returned to France. His works include such fat volumes of poetry as Aquarium (1917) and Rose des vents [compass card] (1920) and the novel Les Dernières Nuits de Paris (1928; tr. Last Nights of Paris, 1929).

Reviews

[Grigoria · Rating 4 out of 5]

(I bought a greek translation of this book a few years back for a very low price at a bazaar. At that point I had developed an interest in the literature associated with the surrealists, although I have never been a fan of the painting of the same movement. I proved not to be a great enthusiast of the writings either and the book ended on a shelf at my mother's house. My sister gave it a look recently and expressed how much she liked it, thus I thought of re-reading it before giving it to her.)

"Le Negre", by Philippe Soupault, is almost ninety years old and non-the-less contemporary as ever. It talks about freedom and opposition to the conservative ideas that make the western civilization sterile.Its main character, Maning, is an outlaw, a murdered, a drug dealer, a pimp, a worker, a sea-man, a traveler, a jazz drummer, a man who stands on the underside of what is considered fine, pure and civil and a representative of what was considered, in the twenties, to be a negro-as in the title of the book-from Africa, although he comes from America.

The writing style is brisk, with small sentences that resemble the fiction of the bitnicks and perhapas film scripts. It carries something from the rythmof the music of the decade it referes to and although the book is small in size it invites for multiple readings, due to the sort of poetic mode of Soupault.

I am happy to have underestimated it in the past because I got the opportunity to read it afresh, andmost probably will re-read it in the future.