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Excerpt from Return to My Native Land by Aimé Césaire
Look, now I am only a man, no degradation, no spit perturbs him,
now I am only a man who accepts emptied of anger
(nothing left in his heart but immense love, which burns)
my race that no ablution of hyssop mixed with lilies could purify
my race pitted with blemishes
my race ripe grapes for drunken feet
my queen of spittle and leprosy
my queen of whips and scrofula
my queen of squamae and chloasma
(oh those queens I once loved in the remote gardens of spring
against the illumination of all the candles of the chestnut trees!)
I accept. I accept.
and the flogged nigger saying "Forgive me master"
and the twenty-nine legal blows of the whip
and the four foot high cell
and the spiked carcan
and the hamstringing of my runaway audacity
and the fluer de lys flowing from the red iron into the fat of my shoulder
....
The term “nigger”—a word used historically to dehumanize Black people—was a linguistic weapon in the arsenal of colonial violence. It chained the colonized African to an imposed inferiority. While such terms may be less publicly used today, their modern equivalents carry no less shame. These words resonate with the echo of racial, gendered, and religious contempt.
Often, those branded with such names will seek to deny or distance themselves from the label—sometimes attempting to “prove” they are not that. This leads to a kind of intellectual and emotional self-taming. But these words are not dead. They remain charged, heavy with historical and emotional weight.
Any society that divides humanity into “niggers” and “non-niggers” is inherently racist. It is a society of absolutes, one that sees only “white values” as good or valid. A sick society—defining people through crude and primitive categories. And even now, in an allegedly “post-racial” world, we see the lingering infections of this old disease.
If modern society still clings to these categories—if it continues to police identity, to uphold silent hierarchies—it must be even more ashamed than before.
The cure is not to erase the “infected.” The cure lies in embracing the fragmented, contradictory nature of the world—and in softening the minds that inhabit it.
“I am ...”
“I shall remain ...”
"من ... هستم، ... پابرجا خواهم ماند."
Original Farsi Article:
https://web.archive.org/web/20130407013326/http://ruzbeh-s.blogfa.com/post-17.aspx