Dominique de Villepin – The fraternity of sorcerers: Wifredo Lam and the poets

he painted with, he transformed into colours and into forms, dancing
shapes of ritual dances of beastly figures with horns and sharp mouths, at
some moment howling through touches of colours reminding of Miró’s
windows to otherworldly colours, at another moment captured in solemn
gestures on the dark backgrounds of a half-open inferno. Sensitive to words,
he published himself poetical writings, in Spanish as well as in French, or
favoured the publication and translation of his friends’ poems. But before
all Wifredo Lam’s paintings are poetry beyond language itself. He’s even
more a poet in his understanding of painting.
The meeting with Aimé Césaire, master of the awakening of the “snakecharming
Martinique” described by Breton, is another key to his work and
to his relationship with poetry, with poems and with poets all at once. He did
not conceive creation as an abstraction but as flesh and bone, as immediate
friendship of two souls, one speaking, one listening, and as the intimate
bond of a whole community, knit together by the commonwealth of words.
His connection to Aimé Césaire’s négritude, to the solemn and inventive
poetry of Haiti, of Rene Depestre or Jacques Stephen Alexis to the luxurious
historical epics of the Caribbean spirit of Édouard Glissant had the same
intimacy, because it opened up to him the horizon of his native land. It
is not by chance that Wifredo Lam wanted Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au
pays natal to be published in Spanish and to illustrate it. He asked his close
friend Lydia Cabrera to translate it into Spanish. This “way home” was Lam’s
own itinerary. He had left Cuba for Spain and France with not much more
than dreams of what he would find, leaving a scorched and unspeakable
land and he travelled back, in the turmoil of history, on the Capitaine-
Paul-Lemerle, the “Flying Dutchman” of European intelligence, that was to
transport in 1941 three hundred artists and intellectuals to their exile in the
Americas, among which André Breton with his wife and daughter, Victor
Serge, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Anna Seghers. The Caribbean was at this time
under the spell of intolerance and political oppression, specifically in the
French Antilles with Admiral Robert as governor.
But the movement of the négritude was not about restoring an old identity.
It was about retrieving a dignity and inventing a destiny and a future. It
was about transforming the most savage of experiences – slavery – in a
reconciliation of the broken world. This poetry is a constant struggle, it is
the banner of the humiliated and the language of rebellion. His figures are
figures of danger and devouring, dark encounters in a time when the tragic
René Char and Wifredo Lam, Paris 1976
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