Thinking with Spirits, or Dwelling and Knowing in the Work of Aimé Césaire

This article discusses Aimé Césaire’s ethical commitment to more-than-human existence. The intention is not to read Césaire as an ‘eco-poet’, or through the lens of contemporary ‘eco-poetics’, terms which might not have meant much to him in the period from the 1930s to the 1950s, when his poetic project took shape. Even if we may today read Césaire’s poetry in the light of contemporary eco-poetic and eco-philosophical thought, this article is more concerned with examining in his work a set of epistemological viewpoints that take shape around poetry and which reveal the essence of an ethical position concerning the human’s relationship to the natural world. These ethical questions are central to Césaire’s understanding of what Négritude was to be, and, more broadly, to his critique of imperialism and colonialism. The article therefore shows how Césaire’s poetics of creativity and ethics in relation to non-human life develops in interaction with history. If the idea of poetry as possession is the glue that connects all of these ideas, it is because it shows the way they are animated by an African ‘animist’ sensibility that unites the sacred and the secular and intertwines mind and thought with nature.