SOURCE: "On Ancestral Ground: Heroic Figuring in Aimé Césaire," in L'Esprit Créateur, Vol. XXXII, No. 1, Spring 1992, pp. 16-29.

In the following essay, Zimra discusses Césaire's treatment of the recurring textual figure of the Ancestor.

It is hardly an exaggeration to say that contemporary Caribbean writers are obsessed with the past, an obsession made manifest by a recurring textual figure, that of the Ancestor. Both proponents and opponents of the tenets of Negritude, from Senghor to Soyinka, have tended to see the figure as heroic. In the Caribbean text, the ancestral trope plunges into an imaginary past predicated on collective history in order to gain access to a common future. Edouard Glissant calls it "a prophetic reading of the past" (preface to Monsieur Toussaint). But, as he also cautions in Le Discours antillais, this textual strategy may well elide an alienating present and prolong a self...