SOURCE: "Gender, Genre and Geography in Aimé Césaire's Cahier d'un retour au pays natal," in Callaloo, Vol. 18, No. 2, Spring 1995, pp. 492-505.

In the following essay, Kalikoff examines epic qualities, gender-biased assumptions, and elements of female decolonization in Césaire's Cahier d'un retour au pays natal.

Aimé Césaire's Cahier d'un retour au pays natal is one of the acknowledged masterpieces of francophone Caribbean literature. A great work seems to require a great man, a hero who can act and speak for an entire people, and indeed the period Cahier inhabits in Caribbean literary history has been referred to as an era of "Heroic Negritude". There is scarcely any scholarship on the long poem which does not refer to it as "epic" and "heroic." What I would like to argue, however, is that these terms are inappropriate, for two reasons. First, they function to smooth out the disruptive...