Contraindre le chaos à devenir forme: le motif de la descente aux enfers dans Et les chiens se taisaient d’Aimé Césaire

In this paper, I argue that the persistent historical trauma of colonialism leads to a crisis akin to the descent to the underworld (or katabasis) in Aimé Césaire’s Et les chiens se taisaient, in which we may discern the deep patterns shaping the poetics of the author. Offering a close reading of the play grounded in Édouard Glissant’s “poetics of Relation”, I argue that Césaire’s hellish “abyss” functions productively as a poetic trope for the experience of slavery and its traumatic consequences. I also show that the “abyss” (which represents the spatio-temporal rupture engendered by the Atlantic slave trade and the experience of slavery itself) is conceived as a creative void out of which the author’s poetic aesthetic emerges. The article pays particular attention to Césaire’s intertexts, especially Dante and the Divine Comedy. Glissant’s theory of “Relation” is used as a guiding framework to emphasise the dialectical thrust of Césaire’s poetic project.