......And the Dogs Were Silent/......Et les chiens se taisaient

by Aimé Césaire, Álex Gil (translator), Brent Hayes Edwards (foreword)

Available to readers for the first time, Aimé Césaire’s three-act drama . . . . . . And the Dogs Were Silent—written during the Vichy regime in Martinique in 1943 and lost until 2008—dramatizes the Haitian Revolution and the rise and fall of Toussaint Louverture as its heroic leader. This bilingual English and French edition stands apart from Césaire’s more widely known 1946 closet drama. Following the slave revolts that sparked the revolution, Louverture arrives as both prophet and poet, general and visionary. With striking dramatic technique, Césaire retells the revolution in poignant encounters between rebels and colonial forces, guided by a prophetic chorus and Louverture’s steady ethical and political vision. In the last act, we reach the hero’s betrayal, his imprisonment, and his last stand against the lures of compromise. Césaire’s masterwork is a strikingly beautiful and brutal indictment of colonial cruelty and an unabashed celebration of Black rebellion and victory.

Genres: Plays, Historical Fiction

320 pages, Paperback

Published August 27, 2024

About the author

Martinique-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.

Reviews

[A · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mainly the stars are for Alex Gil's introduction, which is thorough and provides the contextualization needed to make this play meaningful. The history of the play is the most interesting part. Césaire wrote it right before returning to Martinique from France in the 1940s, and it is a historical play, with Toussaint Louverture as the tragic hero. There's a good deal in it about the colonizer-colonized dynamic, specifically as it played out in the 1791-1804 Haitian Revolution, and the play charts Toussaint's rise in popularity/following, and his horrible, ultimate death in a dingy French prison. However, in the version of the play that was ultimately published, many of this geographic/historically specific details were blurred or removed. Toussaint becomes "the Rebel," a generic type, many of the details about the Haitian Revolution are removed, and the refrain "Death to the whites," that plays a key part in Act I, is muted (a voice just says it in the background, maybe once). Interesting that this was Césaire's choice, too, to make this a less specific, more 'universal' story. The play is hard to follow, the language is a bit overwrought and surreal, but not necessarily in a successful way. There are significant questions raised by the play, however, like: What is freedom? What is ambition? What are the motivations for choosing not to pursue freedom in the manner of Toussaint?

[Decolnow · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can't speak to the quality of the translation past the fact that the annotations and explanations are thorough and seem to be sensible, but the work in itself is magnificent.

In context of it being a play I can see how people could rate it less than I have, but coming to it from a quotation of Fanon, this has been nothing less than fascinating.
I would recommend reading CLR James "The Black Jacobins" first to have the appropriate (and much needed!) context, but other than that i have enjoyed it heaps!

PS: I got it ordered for the Humboldt University's (Berlin) Facaulty of english literature and its freely available to read inside and take out on a lend, so check it out!

[Donovan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Césaire is a poet above all, and his plays must be evaluated and appreciated primarily for their poetry, not as theatre. While it does not reach the poetic achievements of his greatest and most well-known works, it is superior to his other plays that have been published in English. (Though they may suffer from the translation, since those plays don't provide the original French for comparison as this one does.)