“Colombes et Menfenil” in Text and Image: Taking Flight From Conquest in Aimé Césaire and Wifredo Lam’s Collaborative Aesthetics
This essay examines a little-studied aesthetic collaboration between Aimé Césaire and Wifredo Lam to depict doves and a bird of prey (called “menfenil”) in text and image. “Colombes et menfenil” was the title of a selection of poems by Césaire that was published in Hémisphères magazine in 1944 with...
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| Publicat a: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/coma, |
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| Autor principal: | |
| Format: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Idioma: | Anglais |
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Continents manuscrits
2022
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| Accés en línia: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Sumari: | This essay examines a little-studied aesthetic collaboration between Aimé Césaire and Wifredo Lam to depict doves and a bird of prey (called “menfenil”) in text and image. “Colombes et menfenil” was the title of a selection of poems by Césaire that was published in Hémisphères magazine in 1944 with an illustration by Wifredo Lam. Both birds also appear in Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal and Lam’s illustrations of the Spanish translation of this poem published in Cuba the previous year. They go on to recur in later paintings by Lam: “Menfenil” (1947), “Lunguanda yembe” (1950), and “La colombe noire” (1959). The birds in question have archetypical significance as symbols of peace and war that connect to the history of colonialism. I propose with this essay a critical dialogue with Césaire and Lam’s work on these birds to diffuse the conquest-thinking that informs the symbolic economy and contributes to normalizing the persistence of racialized hierarchies embedded in the history of colonial dispossession and exploitation. In their collaborative aesthetic recasting of these archetypal bird figures, I argue that both poet and painter symbolically take them over to take flight from conquest. |
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