\n
\n
MATTHIAS DE GROOF |\u00a0UNIVERSITY OF ANTWERP
\nKATHLEEN GYSSELS | UNIVERSITY OF ANTWERP<\/p>\n
GIVE ME BACK MY BLACK DOLLS<\/em>:
\nDAMAS’ AFRICA AND ITS MUSEIFICATION, FROM POETRY TO MOVING PICTURES<\/h4>\nT<\/span>he work of the relatively undervalued N\u00e9gritude poet L\u00e9on-Gontran Damas allows for an inter-artistic dialogue. This contribution links Damas\u2019 poetry to an experimental film, Rendez-les-moi<\/em> (2013), directed by Matthias De Groof, one of the authors of the present article, and based on Damas\u2019 poem \u201cLimb\u00e9\u201d (in Pigments<\/em>; 1937). Preceding the artist statement on the film, Kathleen Gyssels provides a useful context for the film. Rather than expediently recycling Damas\u2019 anti-colonial poetry, De Groof\u2019s film tries to deploy aesthetics to render Damas\u2019 poetry a performative speech act, albeit fictionally. The trans-medial aspects of the film\u2014poetry, music, sculpture\u2014aspire towards a freeing of colonized artefacts from the discursive strictures of colonial frameworks and institutions. By offering an interpretation of \u201cLimb\u00e9\u201d as an intervention into the museification of African artefacts, the film participates in a re-evaluation of Damas and N\u00e9gritude. This study does not aim at recasting our understanding of N\u00e9gritude, nor do we attempt at re-canonising Damas\u2019 work, as N\u00e9gritude is itself at odds with canonisation. Instead, we focus on the mediality of the film to illuminate its relation to the poetry. Although \u201cLimb\u00e9\u201d is Damas\u2019 only poem using the figure of the dolls as a pervasive metaphor, we will also analyse a selection of Damas\u2019 other poems in relation to museification.<\/p>\nIn the first part of the essay, <\/strong>Gyssels recovers dimensions of Damas\u2019 suppressed history and artistic vision. Gyssels begins by scrutinizing the poet\u2019s biography in relation to his \u201cblack dolls\u201d and the way the issue of stolen heritage re-emerges throughout his oeuvre (Pigment<\/em>s & Black Label<\/em>). Then, she arrives at a focus on the figure of Damas and his marginality. The metaphor of the \u201cblack dolls\u201d finally appears in the second contribution as a reflection on, rather than an analysis of, De Groof\u2019s film. Rendez-les-moi <\/em>it hopes to open up unique perspectives on the oeuvre of Damas. This critical piece and artist statement facilitates a reconsideration of Damas\u2019 other works.<\/p>\nI. The Damas of Give Me Back My Black Dolls<\/em><\/h4>\n\u201cThe Africa they ransacked, the Africa they robbed me of\u201d<\/em><\/p>\nDe Groof\u2019s film offers an intriguing perspective on \u201cLimb\u00e9\u201d by considering the black dolls as objects stolen from museums. The Mus\u00e9e de l\u2019Homme, in Damas\u2019 mind, becomes a kind of \u201cmausoleum\u201d of the dead and the diseased. Having studied in Paris with Marcel Mauss and Paul Rivet, Damas left the institution because he felt uncomfortable with the fact that European ethnographers\u2014and, more precisely, French ethnographers\u2014stole entire collections of art and tribal masks. The incorporation of these artefacts into the museum space voided them of their ritual function and highlighted African \u201cdarkness\u201d in metropolitan museums. Those public places exhibit Western supremacy and hunger for wealth more than genuine scientific curiosity, an observation that lurks in Damas\u2019 poems. The work of Paul Morand, the controversial interwar writer and traveller who has his protagonist visiting the Tervuren Museum in the short story \u201cSyracuse ou l\u2019homme-panth\u00e8re\u201d (from Magie noire<\/em>, 1927), evokes Damas:<\/p>\n\nThese African beliefs that make of the ritual cloths of the deceased so many extensions of the living person awoke in the heart of the citizen from Syracuse; all the diviners, the necromants who had slipped on these accursed, cast-off garments, all the souls that had been trapped in these calabashes, all the lifeless locks of hair that had been slipped into magic pouces came back to live, signalled their presence. \u201cFlee,\u201d they said; \u201cleave the land that you inhabit; it is fertile only in appearance, but ruin is upon it. Its progress is nothing but prestige; it has made of you a vampire. Return to the land where the trees and the stones speak in the name of the Spirit.\u201d (Morand 1992: 566, qtd in Ezra 143)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
In \u201cThe Dogon as lieu de memoire\u201d (2012), Statchan explains how Marcel De Griaule\u2019s Djibouti expedition irritated Michel Leiris, one of Damas\u2019 friends and fellow ethnographers; we must understand Damas\u2019 metaphor of the black doll in this context.<\/p>\n
French authorities seized Damas\u2019 first and most subversive collection, the polemical Pigments<\/em> (1937), for its outright anti-fascist and anti-colonial discourse. In one of his most famous poems, \u201cIls sont venus ce soir\u201d (\u201cThey came that night,\u201d 2), Damas portrays the colonial invasion of the European colonizer as a moment that forever stops the drumbeat of the many African worshippers and dancers. The arrival of white barbarians destroyed the African ritual gatherings of dances, songs, and drums:<\/p>\nThey came that night when the
\ntom
\ntom
\nrolled from
\nrhythm
\nto
\nrhythm
\nthe frenzy<\/p>\n
of eyes
\nthe frenzy of hands
\nthe frenzy
\nof statues\u2019 feet
\nSINCE
\nhow many of ME ME ME
\nhave died
\nsince they came that night when the
\ntom
\ntom
\nrolled from
\nrhythm
\nto
\nrhythm
\nthe frenzy
\n(\u201cThey Came that Night\u201d)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
However, by complimenting Damas on the African beat, L\u00e9opold Senghor, one of the initiators of N\u00e9gritude, glossed over the actual event portrayed in \u201cThey came that night \/ Ils sont venus ce soir.\u201d The poem shows men (white or black) slaughtering and ransacking and discusses genocidal violence and how the poet is incapable of actually counting the relentless accumulation of colonialism\u2019s victims. Damas hints at the long-lasting aftershocks of colonial rule, the collision between two cultures in which the oppressed turn to \u201cstatues\u201d (i.e. inanimate dolls), to ashes, deprived of now-museified tribal masks and weapons.<\/p>\n
This opening poem also hints at the racialized \u00e9lite, the \u00e9volu\u00e9s <\/em>betraying their own \u201crace,\u201d enslaving their own \u201cblood\u201d (\u201cEt Caetera\u201d and \u201cS O S\u201d echo this lament). Not explicitly naming the culprits, Damas denounces both the French invader (the White perpetrator) and theAfricans who sold their own brothers and sisters into slavery, complicit in their razzias<\/em>; this vilification is most explicit in an inflammatory litany in the first movement of Black-Label.<\/em> Additionally, he uses the pass\u00e9 compos\u00e9<\/em> tense to push the reader to reconsider a singular event (a specific evening of brutal colonial invasion as a sexually suggestive European \u201cpenetration,\u201d) as the inception of what became a history of brutal conquests and violent incursions by white colonizers that continues into the present.<\/p>\nIn \u201cEt Caetera,\u201d Damas indirectly condemns the enrolment of racialized troops, specifically Senegalese soldiers, in the French army. Thousands of soldiers for the French war machine came from Saint-Louis du S\u00e9n\u00e9gal, the colonial capital on the Western coast of S\u00e9n\u00e9gal. Embracing the loyalty France expected from its colonies was indeed one of the attitudes characteristic of the first generation of black and other racialized leaders in the interwar and immediate independences. Damas condemns the endless tribute paid by Africa\u2019s sons and daughters as an image of a gigantic machine making more soldiers for France’s war. He blames the French occupier in Senegal for having \u201cransacked\u201d the black continent and its populations. The innumerable sacrificed soldiers (from the Caribbean, America, and Africa) haunt Damas: they become his \u201cspectral ghosts\u201d<\/span>[1]<\/a> who follow him everywhere on his sails and crossings, as his ancestors did during the Middle Passage. His poem, \u201cThe Wind,\u201d describes another sleepless night as he crosses the Black Atlantic, hearing a polyphonic choir of ghosts. (Damas, Pigments <\/em>17) Out of the darkness, in spite of the silence, the poet captures messages from the elements and the unseen, the haunting silence of the many unheard voices echoes in his ears. The poem \u201cBuried treasures\u201d already demonstrates the poet\u2019s conviction that not only human but also non-human loss is buried on the bottom of the ocean. The silenced voices in this poem impress themselves on the world under the cover of night, causing an extreme tension on the part of the enclosed, entrapped, and enlisted subjects. The ethnographer will have the same uncanny experience, in reference to what Freud calls \u201cUnheimlich,\u201d when she or he strolls through the many museums of Paris, London, or Brussels. In \u201cif tomorrow the ghosts,\u201d Damas writes, \u201cI\u2019m haunted by their memory\u201d (Black-Label<\/em>, M II). Ghosts are everywhere.<\/span><\/p>\n[K]Not’s and Lines<\/em><\/p>\nThe third cofounder of the literary-political movement N\u00e9gritude<\/em>, L\u00e9on-Gontran Damas embodies the Caribbean concept of creolization. His name aptly expresses this creolized heritage. Exploring the significations of his last name, Damas, inherited by some French \u201cbagnard,\u201d the militant author intertwines the noun damas<\/em>, which refers to an iron to forge weapons, with the image of sea knots and textile knots (\u201cdamass\u00e9, fibre\u201d<\/em>). Among all these polysemic uses, Damas favours indeed one specifically haunting image. Keith Walker articulates the symbolism of Damas\u2019 name and its use in his poetry in Countermodernism<\/em> (1999):<\/p>\n\nThe slipknot is also a recurring image in the writing of the C\u00e9saire-Damas generation. Like the lifelines metaphor, the slipknot has much to do with the sea and survival. It is polyvalent in its signifying power and multilayered in its richness and aptness to the history and experience of New World Blacks, evoking a string of verbal associations that plot the legacy of the Middle Passage, colonial domination, plantation experience and post-colonialism: capture, bound hands, nautical voyage, bondage, suicide, lynching, strangulation, triangulation, struggle, tics, knots prestidigitation, escape, freedom and survival. (14)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
The noun \u201cdamas\u201d by extension also refers to a \u201ccord,\u201d a \u201cline,\u201d which resonates with sinister images often recycled<\/em> by the poet: indeed, Damas repeatedly inserts the intrusion of a hanging Negro, lynched at dawn for \u201chaving wanted to cross the line.\u201d This fictional double of himself shows the poet entangled in all kinds of existential knots. In Amerindian cultures, the knot often serves to measure time, as in the Aztec and Mayan calendars. The knot comes close to the other famous \u201cmetaphor\u201d for mixed cultures in the New World, the \u201cbranchement\u201d (see Amselle 2001) and Glissant’s \u201crhizome,\u201d which Amselle (1990) criticizes for risking a slide into a new \u201cessentialism.\u201d Considering these diverse connotations, the cord with its potential to form a knot, may thus serve as metaphor that chronicles and summarizes the effects of colonization. Damas has always defined himself as \u201cfils de trios fleuves\u201d (\u201cson of three rivers\u201d), thereby objecting too strong polarities between Africa (the Niger) and Europe (the Seine). Thus, as part of his personal familial heritage, Damas has the blood of three rivers running through his veins: African blood, blood of the indigenous peoples of the Americas, and European blood.<\/p>\nDamas \u2013 the city dweller and bohemian, the jazz lover and anthropologist, the censured poet and \u201cd\u00e9put\u00e9 d\u00e9pit\u00e9\u201d (deceived politician)<\/span>[2]<\/a>\u2014was ahead of his time, moving beyond the antagonisms of N\u00e9gritude. Not only did he claim African heritage alongside Amerindian and European (Gyssels 2009), but he also moved away from strong binaries regarding class and gender. Importantly, he struggled to move beyond masculinity as a cultural construction opposed to femininity (cf. infra). Regarding his own mixed identity, the poet acknowledged the important yet invisible figure of the \u201cred-skinned Galibi,\u201d<\/span>[3]<\/a> \u201cla Tigresse des Hauts Plateaux,\u201d\u00a0<\/span>living on the borders of the Or\u00e9noque-river in the Amazonian forest. In Black-Label<\/em> (1956: 63), Damas poem \u201cRoucouyennes\u201d (BL<\/em> 21) reclaims the \u201cbone flute\u201d (\u201cfl\u00fbte en tibia\u201d BL<\/em> 31) as both fetish and ritual instrument. Elsewhere in Black-Label<\/em>, tribal music is evoked through the rhythms played on a \u201cfl\u00fbte de bambou\u201d (\u201cbamboo flute\u201d BL<\/em> 45). In these poems it seems as though the lyrical voice is trying to remember a female ancestor on the Amerindian side, \u201cune Galibi matin\u00e9e de sang Congo.\u201d This emphasis on the Amerindian population already shows Damas working between the Lines, in what Homi K. Bhabha calls the \u201cthird zone\u201d (Bhabha 1993), between the interstices of disciplines and among varying cultural heritage(s).<\/p>\nFighting alienation and racism, the Guyanese Damas would take issue with some of the most divisive issues to come out of the next generations from the French Caribbean. First of all the \u201cantillanit\u00e9\u201d-movement by Glissant, as well as the second \u201ccr\u00e9olit\u00e9\u201d-movement founded by Confiant and Chamoiseau in the footsteps of Martinican Aim\u00e9 C\u00e9saire face the material as well as cultural dependence from the colonial Metropolis. Senghor, C\u00e9saire, Glissant all claim to write in hermetic style. When Senghor states in the \u201cIntroduction\u201d to Anthologie de la nouvelle po\u00e9sie n\u00e8gre et malgache<\/em> that \u201cDamas\u2019 poetry is not sophisticated\u201d (PUF, 1948: 5), he indirectly reinforces scholarly neglect of Damas\u2019 poetry and prose. Senghor\u2019s comment is indicative of the somewhat turbulent partnership among the founders of N\u00e9gritude. Although marginalized within his own movement, Damas\u2019 writing has been taken up by some later critics (see Kesteloot 1963), and authors from the African Diaspora, including Glissant who in his Discours antillais<\/em> (1981, tr. Caribbean Discourse<\/em>) places Damas alongside Haitian Jacques Roumain from the Indig\u00e9nist-<\/em>movement, and Cuban Nicolas Guill\u00e9n (Glissant 1989: 154). Yet other reasons have to be taken into account for the waning of Damas\u2019 canonical stature and the obfuscation of his militant work. On the margins of the French-Caribbean canon, omitted from manifestos by Glissant and Chamoiseau, Damas deserves to be reread as his work also approaches a transgression of the lines between living and dead, object and subject, male and female, homo- and heterosexual. Also, contrary to more accessible poetry, his poetry has from its inception appealed strongly to visual arts. His second collection, aptly entitled Graffiti<\/em> (1952) already testifies to the writings on the wall, so-to-speak, of marginalized cultures and the long-lasting pictures engraved on the minds of subaltern subjects. An early voice to publicly address issues of the colonization and oppression, Damas\u2019 interwar period work proves a fertile ground for reframing Black poetry from the (post-)N\u00e9gritude period. The following experimental short film, along with its director\u2019s artistic statement, highlight these elements in Damas\u2019 poetry, in particular in \u201cLimb\u00e9.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n![\"Web_3](\"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/05\/Web_3-screenshot-rendez-les-moi.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
Figure 1: Still from Rendez-les-moi<\/em> (Give me back my black dolls<\/em>), 2013<\/p>\nII. Rendez-les-moi\u00a0: <\/em><\/strong>\u201cGive me back my black dolls\u201d through moving pictures<\/strong><\/h4>\nThe short experimental film Rendez-les-moi<\/em> (Give me back my black dolls<\/em>) was part of De Groof\u2019s work in 2013 during an IFAA-residency at Nijmegen.[4]<\/a> The Film interprets Damas\u2019 poem \u201cLimb\u00e9\u201d as an expression of longing for a suppressed African cultural heritage now predominantly found in museums. The film might be called a \u201cvisual poem,\u201d using the technique of \u201ccam\u00e9ra-stylo\u201d or \u201ccamera pen\u201d that Alexandre Astruc describes as a form through which an artist is able to express his thoughts, tearing loose from<\/em> the image for<\/em> the image of the immediate anecdote (Astruc 324-5). The camera in Rendez-les-moi<\/em> renders a visual poem guided by a linguistic one, L\u00e9on-Gontran Damas\u2019 \u201cLimb\u00e9\u201d as if Damas too is holding the pen. After the introductory exposition of a mask spinning as a Miles Davis\u2019 record plays, camera movements work to imply the subjective viewpoint of an imaginary person standing in front of a showcase in an Africa-museum. In a voyeuristic spy-shot, the camera takes on the imagined perspective of a person. This person surreptitiously gazes at a single black doll displayed behind glass. In a subsequent shot, viewers see a series of African cultural artefacts. Just at that moment, the film\u2019s audience hears the poet\u2019s voice. The voice, reading Damas\u2019 poem, infers that the subjective gaze of the camera is also the gaze of Damas, who recites:<\/p>\nGive me back my black dolls
\nso they dispel
\nthe image of pale whores
\nmerchants of love who stroll back and forth
\non the boulevard of my ennui<\/p>\n
Give me back my black dolls
\nso they dispel
\nthe eternal image
\nthe hallucinatory image
\nof stacked large-assed puppets
\nwhose miserable mercy
\nthe wind carries to the nose
\n(\u201cLimb\u00e9\u201d)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
In this recital, Damas gives an imperative order, addressed to the museum, to \u201cgive him back his black dolls.\u201d The film uses camera movements to translate an understanding of Damas\u2019 shame and the taboo of the subject: the museum dominates and exploits \u201chis black dolls.\u201d Indeed, in the context of the poem, the artefacts function as \u201cwhores\u201d in the public space of the museum: undressed from their ritual costumes and behind vitrines, they are dominated as historically and racially inferior. Exhibited as idols, they suggest an African cultural heritage at the disposal of colonial projects. Through their static presentation, they become negative symbols of Western historical progression. Implying a remote past, they reinforce the West\u2019s image as developed and modern. Looted, traded, and domesticated, the dolls become the relics of Western colonialism. Referred to as a variation of a Western past existing in the present, these objects make Africa into Europe\u2019s eternal museum. Ethnologized, the black dolls are \u201cothered\u201d as remote and museified, historicized as past. Put at both temporal and spatial distances, they are defined by a museum, which uses the \u201cself as measure\u201d and makes from Protagoras\u2019 Homo Mensura<\/em> doctrine: Europa mensura.<\/em><\/p>\nCategorized, the black dolls are constructed as primitive; assimilated, they are conceived of as barbarous and imagined as exotic. As V.Y. Mudimbe elucidates, African artefacts \u201cseem to be remnants [\u2026] of absolute beginnings\u201d (64). Moreover:<\/p>\n
[t]he ethnographic museum enterprise espoused a historical orientation, deepening the need for the memory of an archaic European civilization and, consequently, expounding reasons for decoding exotic and primitive objects as symbolic and contemporary signs of a Western antiquity. (61)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Ethnographic museums appropriated African artefacts in order to assimilate them in a play of otherness and sameness so that they speak to us as our contemporary history. Art museums assign these artefacts aesthetic qualities so that they speak as art. N\u00e9gritude attributes them with an alterity that refuses to be reduced to a Western gaze. This view of art is distinct from the understanding formed by institutionalized Western Art History, in which art has its place outside daily life, a detachment reflected by the spatial distinction of the museum (see K\u00f6nig 2007).<\/p>\n
L\u2019art n\u00e8gre<\/em>, by contrast, is not only fundamentally entangled with life, but its ultimate function is to manifest l\u2019\u00e2me noire. <\/em>In other words, Damas identifies with the artefacts he sees in the museum and sees the imprisonment of African cultural heritage as an act of alienation in which museums took part. He writes:<\/p>\nmy courage recovered
\nmy audacity
\nI become myself once again
\nmyself once more
\nout of what I was Yesterday
\nyesterday
\nwithout complexity
\nyesterday
\nwhen the hour of uprooting came<\/p>\n
Will they ever know this rancor in my heart
\nOpened to the eye of my mistrust too late
\nthey stole the space that was mine
\n<\/a>(\u201cLimb\u00e9\u201d)[5]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\nUprooting the masks from their cultural context and \u201cstealing the space that was mine\u201d functioned within the logics of cultural colonisation and alienation: this theft was French policy everywhere in the French empire, from the Afrique-\u00c9quatoriale fran\u00e7aise (AEF<\/em>) and Afrique-Occidentale fran\u00e7aise (AOF<\/em>) and in the Caribbean especially. Colonialism required this politics of assimilation.<\/p>\nConsequently, the poet of the post-colony first and foremost tries to recover and recuperate the loss. The idea of a \u201crestoration\u201d\u2014(redevenu moi-m\u00eame [\u2026] de ce que [\u2026] j\u2019\u00e9tais hier[\u2026]quand est venue l\u2019heure du d\u00e9racinement<\/em>)\u2014without hindering transformation into something \u201cnew\u201d (nouveau<\/em>) is typical to N\u00e9gritude. Yet the work of many of its members have nevertheless at times been considered traditionalist. However, in a context of alienation, nostalgia on the part of the victim is never far-off, as demonstrated by the succession of words in the poem:<\/p>\nthe custom, the days, the life
\nthe song, the rhythm, the effort
\nthe path, the water, the huts
\nthe smoke gray earth
\nthe wisdom, the words, the discussion
\nthe elders
\nthe cadence, the hands, the tempo, the hands
\nthe stampings of feet
\nthe ground
\n(\u201cLimb\u00e9\u201d)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
The \u201ccolonized heritage\u201d has been altered into \u201ccolonial heritage\u201d: the masks end up being decapitated from their costumes and their ritual meaning. Exhibited behind glass, they function within the knowledge\/power structure of the modernistic Weltanschauung<\/em> of the museum. The significance of museification is most drastically expressed in reference to Walter Benjamin\u2019s terminology from his famous essay \u201cThe Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction\u201d (1936): artefacts change from the modality of ritual-value to the modality of exposition-value in the context of reproducibility (248). Nevertheless, the decapitated masks are not dead. To paraphrase the canonical 1953 French film-essay on African art Statues Also Die <\/em>by Chris Marker, Alain Resnais, and Ghislain Cloquet, the masks still maintain the power to enchant, which is why they feature in De Groof\u2019s film.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n![\"Web_1](\"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/05\/Web_1-screenshot-rendez-les-moi.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
Figure 2: Still from Rendez-les-moi<\/em> (Give me back my black dolls<\/em>), 2013, 3\u2019 depicting Pierrot Barra\u2019s installation artwork \u201cAgw\u00e9.\u201d<\/p>\nRendez-les-moi<\/em> attempts to fulfil a transatlantic cinematic restitution of the black dolls by incorporating Pierrot Barra\u2019s installation artwork \u201cAgw\u00e9.\u201d This contemporary piece by the Haitian artist Barra (1942-1999) has the form of a boat that carries dolls. On the boat, the film\u2019s viewers see Iwa Agwe, <\/em>a voodoo sea-spirit, represented as captain of the ship Imamou, <\/em>which brings the deceased back to their ancestral home of Africa. Barra\u2019s works were primarily intended to serve as \u201clittle altars\u201d for the initi\u00e9s<\/em>, the members of the hounfor <\/em>admiring and praying the loas<\/em> or voodoo pantheon. Syncretising West-African animist and Spirit religions with Catholicism and freemasonry, voodoo was developed by slaves in Saint-Domingue and was a supportive factor behind the Haitian revolution (1804) that secured the world\u2019s first Black Republic.[6]<\/a><\/p>\nGive me the illusion I will no longer have to satisfy
\nthe sprawling need
\nof mercies snoring
\nbeneath the world\u2019s unconscious disdain
\n(\u201cLimb\u00e9\u201d)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
One of the dolls shown in the film turns a closed eye on the word disdain<\/em>, accentuating its contempt. Damas, for his part, articulates the disdain that often accompanies mercy, as a sentiment projected by the colonizer onto the colonized. In \u201cLimb\u00e9\u201d he describes\/illustrates the disdainful mercy expressed for the dolls by a seemingly compassionate museum visitor. Damas demands to give him the illusion<\/em> that he could get rid of empty mercy and reanimate the dolls (and we acknowledge the fact that the dolls stand in as a metaphor for objectified women, who do not appear in the poem).<\/p>\nGive me back my black dolls
\nso that I can play with them
\nthe na\u00efve games of my instinct
\nwhich has remained in the shadow of its laws
\n(\u201cLimb\u00e9\u201d)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
In the poem, the word illusion<\/em> stresses the fatalist impossibility of what he asks: to get rid of a merciful and paralyzing attitude and to liberate his heritage from the museum in order to metamorphose it with new meaning\u2014his<\/em> meaning. The sad irony of Damas\u2019 work is that he cannot see past these dolls as objects: the chance of recuperation is tied to his own domination of them.<\/p>\nIn the visual<\/em> poem however, spoken words connect with the medium of moving images. De Groof takes up Damas\u2019 wish to get the illusion, as explained above, across two phases in the film. First, a series of vertical shots (tilts) in parallel montage connects iron objects used to chain slaves (shown with downward tilts) and the black dolls (shown with upward tilts).<\/span>[7]<\/a> Second, the illusion of liberation through cinema develops in the final sequence where a succession of shots depicts artefacts in movement. Vertical and circular movements as well as abstract shots, detach the objects from their display, attempting to break these object free from their place in the museum and its connection with colonial history.<\/span><\/p>\n![\"Web_2](\"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/05\/Web_2-screenshot-rendez-les-moi.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
Figure 3: Still from Rendez-les-moi<\/em> (Give me back my black dolls<\/em>), 2013, 3\u2019, depicting G\u00e9rard Quenum\u2019s black dolls, Courtesy of the Artist.<\/p>\nIII Concluding Thoughts<\/strong><\/h5>\nBy reading \u201cLimb\u00e9\u201d and other poems by Damas, we have tried to shed light on a particular metaphor used by the poet to denounce the process of dehumanization as defined in Aim\u00e9 C\u00e9saire\u2019s Discourse on Colonialism<\/em> (1950). The image of the black doll might also refer to the many artistic objects stolen by French ethnographers and explorers, visitors and art collectors, in the colonies. Moreover, the metaphoric black doll crosses different lines the poet wanted to abolish: between ages, sexes, races, and classes. The reading of this poem illustrates how much Damas\u2019 poetry can be amplified through close reading and artistic practice. De Groof\u2019s film presents an audio-visual interpretation of Damas\u2019 work. It may serve as an example of the ways in which Caribbean literature can inspire contemporary film art as a recuperative and reconciliatory strategy. Resulting films then offer new interpretations and thus encourage re-reading of Caribbean writers such as Damas.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
Acknowledgments<\/strong>: This work was supported by the Foundation for Scientific Research-Flanders (FWO)<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
Works Cited<\/strong><\/p>\nAmselle, Jean-Loup. Logiques me\u0301tisses: Anthropologie de l’identite\u0301 en Afrique et ailleurs<\/em>. Paris: Payot, 1990. Print.<\/p>\n—. Branchements: Anthropologie de l’universalite\u0301 des cultures<\/em>. Paris, Flammarion, 2001. Print.<\/p>\nAstruc, Alexandre, “Du stylo \u00e0 la cam\u00e9ra et de la cam\u00e9ra au stylo (Birth of a new avant-garde: le cam\u00e9ra-stylo).”<\/em> <\/strong>L’\u00c9cran fran\u00e7ais<\/em> 144 (1948): 324-8. Print.<\/p>\nBenjamin, Walter. \u201cThe Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.\u201d Illuminations<\/em>. New York: Schocken Books, 1977 [1936]. Print.<\/p>\nButler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.”<\/em> New York: Routledge, 1993. Print.<\/p>\nConroy-Kennedy, Elizabeth. The Negritude Poets: An Anthology of Translations from the French.<\/em> NY. Thunder\u2019s Mouth Press, 1989. 39-61. Print.<\/p>\nDamas, L\u00e9on-Gontran. Pigments, N\u00e9vralgies<\/em>. Trans. Lillehei. Paris: Pr\u00e9sence Africaine, 1972. Print.<\/p>\n—. Black-Label<\/em>, Paris: Gallimard, 1956. Print.<\/p>\n—. Derni\u00e8re escale<\/em>, posthumous edition, Paris: Regard du temps, 2012. Print.<\/p>\nDroixhe, Daniel. “Variations autour de Jazz-Band<\/em> (1922) de Robert Goffin.” Brussels: Acad\u00e9mie royale de langue et de litt\u00e9rature fran\u00e7aises de Belgique, 2007. Accessed 11 November 2011. (arllfb.be\/ebibliotheque\/communications\/droixhe100307.pdf)<\/p>\nEzra, Elizabeth. The Colonial Unconscious: Race and Culture in Interwar France<\/em>. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2000. Print.<\/p>\nGlissant, Edouard. Discours antillais.<\/em> Paris, Seuil, 1981. Print.<\/p>\nGyssels, Kathleen. \u201c\u2018Scandal\u2019: Queer avant la lettre (L\u00e9on Damas, James Baldwin).\u201d Queer. Ecritures de la diff\u00e9rence<\/em>. Ed. Pierre Zoberman. Paris: L\u2019Harmattan, 2008. 219-241. Print.<\/p>\n———-. \u201cLa po\u00e9sie par le th\u00e9\u00e2tre avec L\u00e9on Damas.\u201d Emergences cara\u00efbes: une cr\u00e9ation th\u00e9\u00e2trale archip\u00e9lique, Africultures<\/em> 80\/81 (2010): 132-141. Print.<\/p>\n———-. \u201cL\u00e9on-Gontran Damas et le mythe de l\u2019Am\u00e9rindien.\u201d Dalhousie French Studies<\/em> 86 (2009): 45-56. Print.<\/p>\n———-. Passes et impasses dans le comparatisme carib\u00e9en postcolonial. Cinq traverses<\/em>.<\/p>\nParis: Champion, 2010. Print.<\/p>\n
Kesteloot, Lilyan. Ecrivains noirs d\u2019expression fran\u00e7aise<\/em>, Naissance d\u2019une litt\u00e9rature<\/em>. Brussels: ULB & Institut Solvay, 1963. Print.<\/p>\nK\u00f6nig, Amy H. “Where do Statues go when they die? On Art, Colonialism and Complicity: Thoughts after Seeing Les Statues Meurent Aussi<\/em> (Statues Also Die<\/em>), a Film by Alain Resnais and Chris Marker.” h2so4<\/em> 14 (2007). Accessed 11 November 2011.<\/p>\nLarsen, Nella. Passing<\/em>. New York, London: A. A. Knopf, 1929. Print.<\/p>\nLillehei, Alexandra. 2011. Pigments<\/em> in Translation<\/em>, online thesis for Wesleyan University. Accessed 11 November 2011. http:\/\/wesscholar.wesleyan.edu\/etd_hon_theses\/706\/<\/p>\nMarker, Chris, Alain Resnais, and Ghislain Cloquet. Statues Also Die <\/em>(Les statues meurent aussi<\/em>), <\/em>Pr\u00e9sence Africaine, 30\u2019, 1953. Film.<\/p>\nMichel, Jean-Claude. Les \u00e9crivains noirs et le surr\u00e9alisme<\/em>. Sherbrooke, Que\u0301bec: Naaman, 1982. Print.<\/p>\nMudimbe, V. Y. The Idea of Africa<\/em>. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. Print.<\/p>\nPerret, Thierry; Carr\u00e9, Nathalie and Philippe, Nathalie, Les grandes voix du Sud<\/em>, vol 2, RFI \/ CulturesFrance: Fr\u00e9meaux & Associ\u00e9s, 2007. Print.<\/p>\nSalkey, Andrew. An Island Post. Stories from the Caribbean<\/em>, Liveright, 1970. Print.<\/p>\n—. Breaklight. Poets of the Caribbean<\/em>, Anchor Books, 1973. Print.<\/p>\nSenghor, L\u00e9opold S\u00e9dar, Anthologie \u00e0 la nouvelle po\u00e9sie n\u00e8gre et malgache<\/em>, Paris, PUF, 1948. Print.<\/p>\n—. Libert\u00e9 III<\/em>, Paris: Seuil, 1977. Print.<\/p>\n—. Hosties Noires<\/em>. Collection “Pierres Vives”. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1948. Print.<\/p>\nStratchan, John. \u201cDogon as lieux de m\u00e9moire.\u201d Accessed 11 Nov 2012. http:\/\/eprints.lancs.ac.uk\/67467\/1\/DOGON_OF_MALI_REF_VERSION.PDF<\/p>\n
Walker, Keith. Countermodernism and Francophone Literary Cultures: the Game of Slipknot<\/em>, Dunham, Duke UP, 1999. Print.<\/p>\nWarner, Keith Q., ed. Critical Perspectives on L\u00e9on-Gontran Damas,<\/em> Washington: Three Continents Press, 1988. Print.<\/p>\nWastiau, Boris. Medusa: The African Sculpture of Enchantment<\/em>, Gene\u0300ve: Muse\u0301e d’ethnographie de Gene\u0300ve, 2008. Print.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
Image Notes.<\/strong><\/p>\nFigure 1: Still from Rendez-les moi<\/em> (Give me back my black dolls<\/em>), 2013, 3\u2019<\/p>\nFigure 2:\u00a0Still from Rendez-les moi<\/em> (Give me back my black dolls<\/em>), 2013, 3\u2019 depicting Pierrot Barra\u2019s installation artwork \u201cAgw\u00e9\u201d.<\/p>\nFigure 3: Still from Rendez-les moi<\/em> (Give me back my black dolls<\/em>), 2013, 3\u2019, depicting G\u00e9rard Quenum\u2019s black dolls, Courtesy of the Artist.<\/p>\n<\/a>Notes<\/strong><\/p>\n[1]<\/a> A strong theme recurrently reappearing in Harlem Renaissance poetry. See Gyssels Kathleen, \u201cDamas et McKay : les d\u00e9mons blancs\u201d, Riveneuve Continents<\/em> (automne-hiver 2008-2009), Hors-S\u00e9rie, Harlem Heritage: 219-227. Gyssels, Kathleen, \u201cCorrespondances et consonances: Bois-d\u2019Eb\u00e8ne <\/em>et Black-Label\u201d<\/em>, in R\u00e9volte, subversion et d\u00e9veloppement chez Jacques Roumain<\/em>, Acacia, Michel, ed., Port-au-Prince, Editions de l\u2019Universit\u00e9 d\u2019Etat d\u2019Ha\u00efti, 2009\u00a0: 231-244.<\/p>\n[2]<\/a> Trained as ethnographer and a pupil of Marcel Mauss and Paul Rivet, L\u00e9on-Gontran Damas moves beyond a third Line, the enduring diff\u00e9rend <\/em>around the issue of independence of the French Antilles and French Guiana. A strong opponent to the vote of \u201cd\u00e9partementalisation\u201d launched by C\u00e9saire in 1946, Damas would forever remain the rebel, the \u201cmaroon\u201d who does not fit in the triangle of the more Francophile first Black member of the Acad\u00e9mie fran\u00e7aise (Senghor) and life-long mayor of Fort-de-France, C\u00e9saire. In his accessible poetry, as well as in Retour de Guyane<\/em> (1938), his subversive portrayal of his mother country in his censored travel report on the results of French infiltration in French Guyana, Damas protested fiercely against the d\u00e9partementalisation<\/em> supported by Aim\u00e9 C\u00e9saire and fellow Cayenese intellectuals such as Gaston Monnerville and F\u00e9lix Ebou\u00e9. Rejecting the status of \u201cd\u00e9partement d’outre-mer\u201d for his own country and the neighbouring French islands, Damas was convinced this status between autonomy and dependence would enhance a neo-colonial regime holding the populations in a dreadful double bind.<\/em> In line with Frantz Fanon, Damas believed that as citizens of France, they would always remain outlaws because of their origin and skin colour. Finally, his withdrawal from politics and his distancing from the N\u00e9gritude movement contributed to his isolation.<\/p>\n[3]<\/a> The \u201cGalibi\u201d are one of the many Amerindian tribes living in French Guiana.<\/p>\n[4]<\/a> ifaa-platform.org<\/p>\nhttps:\/\/vimeo.com\/70741130<\/a>\u00a0(pasword: bergendal)<\/p>\nhttps:\/\/vimeo.com\/70731876<\/a>\u00a0(pasword: bergendal)<\/p>\n[5]<\/a> \u201cStole\u201d is not strong enough a translation for \u201ccambrioler.\u201d In The N\u00e9gritude Poets<\/em>, An Anthology of Translations from the French <\/em>(1989 [1975]), Conroy-Kennedy, the verb \u201ccambrioler\u201d gives the stringent equivalent \u201cransacking\u201d (Conroy-Kennedy 1989: 39-61). For Kesteloot, the first essayist to illustrate the entire movement (Kesteloot 1963), the first poems by Damas indeed had a particularly insolent and incisive character. Again the verb has not the stringent corporeal meaning of \u201cfouiller\u201d (nor of \u201ccambrioler\u201d it is: \u201ccamber\u201d being close to \u201cchamber,\u201d the intimate space where atrocities are going on between white master and black slave). Lillehei weakens Damas\u2019 irritation by translating \u201cstole\u201d instead of \u201cransacked.\u201d<\/p>\n[6]<\/a> octobergallery.co.uk\/exhibitions\/2007voy\/index.shtml<\/p>\n
In the first part of the essay, <\/strong>Gyssels recovers dimensions of Damas\u2019 suppressed history and artistic vision. Gyssels begins by scrutinizing the poet\u2019s biography in relation to his \u201cblack dolls\u201d and the way the issue of stolen heritage re-emerges throughout his oeuvre (Pigment<\/em>s & Black Label<\/em>). Then, she arrives at a focus on the figure of Damas and his marginality. The metaphor of the \u201cblack dolls\u201d finally appears in the second contribution as a reflection on, rather than an analysis of, De Groof\u2019s film. Rendez-les-moi <\/em>it hopes to open up unique perspectives on the oeuvre of Damas. This critical piece and artist statement facilitates a reconsideration of Damas\u2019 other works.<\/p>\n \u201cThe Africa they ransacked, the Africa they robbed me of\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n De Groof\u2019s film offers an intriguing perspective on \u201cLimb\u00e9\u201d by considering the black dolls as objects stolen from museums. The Mus\u00e9e de l\u2019Homme, in Damas\u2019 mind, becomes a kind of \u201cmausoleum\u201d of the dead and the diseased. Having studied in Paris with Marcel Mauss and Paul Rivet, Damas left the institution because he felt uncomfortable with the fact that European ethnographers\u2014and, more precisely, French ethnographers\u2014stole entire collections of art and tribal masks. The incorporation of these artefacts into the museum space voided them of their ritual function and highlighted African \u201cdarkness\u201d in metropolitan museums. Those public places exhibit Western supremacy and hunger for wealth more than genuine scientific curiosity, an observation that lurks in Damas\u2019 poems. The work of Paul Morand, the controversial interwar writer and traveller who has his protagonist visiting the Tervuren Museum in the short story \u201cSyracuse ou l\u2019homme-panth\u00e8re\u201d (from Magie noire<\/em>, 1927), evokes Damas:<\/p>\n These African beliefs that make of the ritual cloths of the deceased so many extensions of the living person awoke in the heart of the citizen from Syracuse; all the diviners, the necromants who had slipped on these accursed, cast-off garments, all the souls that had been trapped in these calabashes, all the lifeless locks of hair that had been slipped into magic pouces came back to live, signalled their presence. \u201cFlee,\u201d they said; \u201cleave the land that you inhabit; it is fertile only in appearance, but ruin is upon it. Its progress is nothing but prestige; it has made of you a vampire. Return to the land where the trees and the stones speak in the name of the Spirit.\u201d (Morand 1992: 566, qtd in Ezra 143)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n In \u201cThe Dogon as lieu de memoire\u201d (2012), Statchan explains how Marcel De Griaule\u2019s Djibouti expedition irritated Michel Leiris, one of Damas\u2019 friends and fellow ethnographers; we must understand Damas\u2019 metaphor of the black doll in this context.<\/p>\n French authorities seized Damas\u2019 first and most subversive collection, the polemical Pigments<\/em> (1937), for its outright anti-fascist and anti-colonial discourse. In one of his most famous poems, \u201cIls sont venus ce soir\u201d (\u201cThey came that night,\u201d 2), Damas portrays the colonial invasion of the European colonizer as a moment that forever stops the drumbeat of the many African worshippers and dancers. The arrival of white barbarians destroyed the African ritual gatherings of dances, songs, and drums:<\/p>\n They came that night when the of eyes However, by complimenting Damas on the African beat, L\u00e9opold Senghor, one of the initiators of N\u00e9gritude, glossed over the actual event portrayed in \u201cThey came that night \/ Ils sont venus ce soir.\u201d The poem shows men (white or black) slaughtering and ransacking and discusses genocidal violence and how the poet is incapable of actually counting the relentless accumulation of colonialism\u2019s victims. Damas hints at the long-lasting aftershocks of colonial rule, the collision between two cultures in which the oppressed turn to \u201cstatues\u201d (i.e. inanimate dolls), to ashes, deprived of now-museified tribal masks and weapons.<\/p>\n This opening poem also hints at the racialized \u00e9lite, the \u00e9volu\u00e9s <\/em>betraying their own \u201crace,\u201d enslaving their own \u201cblood\u201d (\u201cEt Caetera\u201d and \u201cS O S\u201d echo this lament). Not explicitly naming the culprits, Damas denounces both the French invader (the White perpetrator) and theAfricans who sold their own brothers and sisters into slavery, complicit in their razzias<\/em>; this vilification is most explicit in an inflammatory litany in the first movement of Black-Label.<\/em> Additionally, he uses the pass\u00e9 compos\u00e9<\/em> tense to push the reader to reconsider a singular event (a specific evening of brutal colonial invasion as a sexually suggestive European \u201cpenetration,\u201d) as the inception of what became a history of brutal conquests and violent incursions by white colonizers that continues into the present.<\/p>\n In \u201cEt Caetera,\u201d Damas indirectly condemns the enrolment of racialized troops, specifically Senegalese soldiers, in the French army. Thousands of soldiers for the French war machine came from Saint-Louis du S\u00e9n\u00e9gal, the colonial capital on the Western coast of S\u00e9n\u00e9gal. Embracing the loyalty France expected from its colonies was indeed one of the attitudes characteristic of the first generation of black and other racialized leaders in the interwar and immediate independences. Damas condemns the endless tribute paid by Africa\u2019s sons and daughters as an image of a gigantic machine making more soldiers for France’s war. He blames the French occupier in Senegal for having \u201cransacked\u201d the black continent and its populations. The innumerable sacrificed soldiers (from the Caribbean, America, and Africa) haunt Damas: they become his \u201cspectral ghosts\u201d<\/span>[1]<\/a> who follow him everywhere on his sails and crossings, as his ancestors did during the Middle Passage. His poem, \u201cThe Wind,\u201d describes another sleepless night as he crosses the Black Atlantic, hearing a polyphonic choir of ghosts. (Damas, Pigments <\/em>17) Out of the darkness, in spite of the silence, the poet captures messages from the elements and the unseen, the haunting silence of the many unheard voices echoes in his ears. The poem \u201cBuried treasures\u201d already demonstrates the poet\u2019s conviction that not only human but also non-human loss is buried on the bottom of the ocean. The silenced voices in this poem impress themselves on the world under the cover of night, causing an extreme tension on the part of the enclosed, entrapped, and enlisted subjects. The ethnographer will have the same uncanny experience, in reference to what Freud calls \u201cUnheimlich,\u201d when she or he strolls through the many museums of Paris, London, or Brussels. In \u201cif tomorrow the ghosts,\u201d Damas writes, \u201cI\u2019m haunted by their memory\u201d (Black-Label<\/em>, M II). Ghosts are everywhere.<\/span><\/p>\n [K]Not’s and Lines<\/em><\/p>\n The third cofounder of the literary-political movement N\u00e9gritude<\/em>, L\u00e9on-Gontran Damas embodies the Caribbean concept of creolization. His name aptly expresses this creolized heritage. Exploring the significations of his last name, Damas, inherited by some French \u201cbagnard,\u201d the militant author intertwines the noun damas<\/em>, which refers to an iron to forge weapons, with the image of sea knots and textile knots (\u201cdamass\u00e9, fibre\u201d<\/em>). Among all these polysemic uses, Damas favours indeed one specifically haunting image. Keith Walker articulates the symbolism of Damas\u2019 name and its use in his poetry in Countermodernism<\/em> (1999):<\/p>\n The slipknot is also a recurring image in the writing of the C\u00e9saire-Damas generation. Like the lifelines metaphor, the slipknot has much to do with the sea and survival. It is polyvalent in its signifying power and multilayered in its richness and aptness to the history and experience of New World Blacks, evoking a string of verbal associations that plot the legacy of the Middle Passage, colonial domination, plantation experience and post-colonialism: capture, bound hands, nautical voyage, bondage, suicide, lynching, strangulation, triangulation, struggle, tics, knots prestidigitation, escape, freedom and survival. (14)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n The noun \u201cdamas\u201d by extension also refers to a \u201ccord,\u201d a \u201cline,\u201d which resonates with sinister images often recycled<\/em> by the poet: indeed, Damas repeatedly inserts the intrusion of a hanging Negro, lynched at dawn for \u201chaving wanted to cross the line.\u201d This fictional double of himself shows the poet entangled in all kinds of existential knots. In Amerindian cultures, the knot often serves to measure time, as in the Aztec and Mayan calendars. The knot comes close to the other famous \u201cmetaphor\u201d for mixed cultures in the New World, the \u201cbranchement\u201d (see Amselle 2001) and Glissant’s \u201crhizome,\u201d which Amselle (1990) criticizes for risking a slide into a new \u201cessentialism.\u201d Considering these diverse connotations, the cord with its potential to form a knot, may thus serve as metaphor that chronicles and summarizes the effects of colonization. Damas has always defined himself as \u201cfils de trios fleuves\u201d (\u201cson of three rivers\u201d), thereby objecting too strong polarities between Africa (the Niger) and Europe (the Seine). Thus, as part of his personal familial heritage, Damas has the blood of three rivers running through his veins: African blood, blood of the indigenous peoples of the Americas, and European blood.<\/p>\n Damas \u2013 the city dweller and bohemian, the jazz lover and anthropologist, the censured poet and \u201cd\u00e9put\u00e9 d\u00e9pit\u00e9\u201d (deceived politician)<\/span>[2]<\/a>\u2014was ahead of his time, moving beyond the antagonisms of N\u00e9gritude. Not only did he claim African heritage alongside Amerindian and European (Gyssels 2009), but he also moved away from strong binaries regarding class and gender. Importantly, he struggled to move beyond masculinity as a cultural construction opposed to femininity (cf. infra). Regarding his own mixed identity, the poet acknowledged the important yet invisible figure of the \u201cred-skinned Galibi,\u201d<\/span>[3]<\/a> \u201cla Tigresse des Hauts Plateaux,\u201d\u00a0<\/span>living on the borders of the Or\u00e9noque-river in the Amazonian forest. In Black-Label<\/em> (1956: 63), Damas poem \u201cRoucouyennes\u201d (BL<\/em> 21) reclaims the \u201cbone flute\u201d (\u201cfl\u00fbte en tibia\u201d BL<\/em> 31) as both fetish and ritual instrument. Elsewhere in Black-Label<\/em>, tribal music is evoked through the rhythms played on a \u201cfl\u00fbte de bambou\u201d (\u201cbamboo flute\u201d BL<\/em> 45). In these poems it seems as though the lyrical voice is trying to remember a female ancestor on the Amerindian side, \u201cune Galibi matin\u00e9e de sang Congo.\u201d This emphasis on the Amerindian population already shows Damas working between the Lines, in what Homi K. Bhabha calls the \u201cthird zone\u201d (Bhabha 1993), between the interstices of disciplines and among varying cultural heritage(s).<\/p>\n Fighting alienation and racism, the Guyanese Damas would take issue with some of the most divisive issues to come out of the next generations from the French Caribbean. First of all the \u201cantillanit\u00e9\u201d-movement by Glissant, as well as the second \u201ccr\u00e9olit\u00e9\u201d-movement founded by Confiant and Chamoiseau in the footsteps of Martinican Aim\u00e9 C\u00e9saire face the material as well as cultural dependence from the colonial Metropolis. Senghor, C\u00e9saire, Glissant all claim to write in hermetic style. When Senghor states in the \u201cIntroduction\u201d to Anthologie de la nouvelle po\u00e9sie n\u00e8gre et malgache<\/em> that \u201cDamas\u2019 poetry is not sophisticated\u201d (PUF, 1948: 5), he indirectly reinforces scholarly neglect of Damas\u2019 poetry and prose. Senghor\u2019s comment is indicative of the somewhat turbulent partnership among the founders of N\u00e9gritude. Although marginalized within his own movement, Damas\u2019 writing has been taken up by some later critics (see Kesteloot 1963), and authors from the African Diaspora, including Glissant who in his Discours antillais<\/em> (1981, tr. Caribbean Discourse<\/em>) places Damas alongside Haitian Jacques Roumain from the Indig\u00e9nist-<\/em>movement, and Cuban Nicolas Guill\u00e9n (Glissant 1989: 154). Yet other reasons have to be taken into account for the waning of Damas\u2019 canonical stature and the obfuscation of his militant work. On the margins of the French-Caribbean canon, omitted from manifestos by Glissant and Chamoiseau, Damas deserves to be reread as his work also approaches a transgression of the lines between living and dead, object and subject, male and female, homo- and heterosexual. Also, contrary to more accessible poetry, his poetry has from its inception appealed strongly to visual arts. His second collection, aptly entitled Graffiti<\/em> (1952) already testifies to the writings on the wall, so-to-speak, of marginalized cultures and the long-lasting pictures engraved on the minds of subaltern subjects. An early voice to publicly address issues of the colonization and oppression, Damas\u2019 interwar period work proves a fertile ground for reframing Black poetry from the (post-)N\u00e9gritude period. The following experimental short film, along with its director\u2019s artistic statement, highlight these elements in Damas\u2019 poetry, in particular in \u201cLimb\u00e9.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Figure 1: Still from Rendez-les-moi<\/em> (Give me back my black dolls<\/em>), 2013<\/p>\n The short experimental film Rendez-les-moi<\/em> (Give me back my black dolls<\/em>) was part of De Groof\u2019s work in 2013 during an IFAA-residency at Nijmegen.[4]<\/a> The Film interprets Damas\u2019 poem \u201cLimb\u00e9\u201d as an expression of longing for a suppressed African cultural heritage now predominantly found in museums. The film might be called a \u201cvisual poem,\u201d using the technique of \u201ccam\u00e9ra-stylo\u201d or \u201ccamera pen\u201d that Alexandre Astruc describes as a form through which an artist is able to express his thoughts, tearing loose from<\/em> the image for<\/em> the image of the immediate anecdote (Astruc 324-5). The camera in Rendez-les-moi<\/em> renders a visual poem guided by a linguistic one, L\u00e9on-Gontran Damas\u2019 \u201cLimb\u00e9\u201d as if Damas too is holding the pen. After the introductory exposition of a mask spinning as a Miles Davis\u2019 record plays, camera movements work to imply the subjective viewpoint of an imaginary person standing in front of a showcase in an Africa-museum. In a voyeuristic spy-shot, the camera takes on the imagined perspective of a person. This person surreptitiously gazes at a single black doll displayed behind glass. In a subsequent shot, viewers see a series of African cultural artefacts. Just at that moment, the film\u2019s audience hears the poet\u2019s voice. The voice, reading Damas\u2019 poem, infers that the subjective gaze of the camera is also the gaze of Damas, who recites:<\/p>\n Give me back my black dolls Give me back my black dolls In this recital, Damas gives an imperative order, addressed to the museum, to \u201cgive him back his black dolls.\u201d The film uses camera movements to translate an understanding of Damas\u2019 shame and the taboo of the subject: the museum dominates and exploits \u201chis black dolls.\u201d Indeed, in the context of the poem, the artefacts function as \u201cwhores\u201d in the public space of the museum: undressed from their ritual costumes and behind vitrines, they are dominated as historically and racially inferior. Exhibited as idols, they suggest an African cultural heritage at the disposal of colonial projects. Through their static presentation, they become negative symbols of Western historical progression. Implying a remote past, they reinforce the West\u2019s image as developed and modern. Looted, traded, and domesticated, the dolls become the relics of Western colonialism. Referred to as a variation of a Western past existing in the present, these objects make Africa into Europe\u2019s eternal museum. Ethnologized, the black dolls are \u201cothered\u201d as remote and museified, historicized as past. Put at both temporal and spatial distances, they are defined by a museum, which uses the \u201cself as measure\u201d and makes from Protagoras\u2019 Homo Mensura<\/em> doctrine: Europa mensura.<\/em><\/p>\n Categorized, the black dolls are constructed as primitive; assimilated, they are conceived of as barbarous and imagined as exotic. As V.Y. Mudimbe elucidates, African artefacts \u201cseem to be remnants [\u2026] of absolute beginnings\u201d (64). Moreover:<\/p>\n [t]he ethnographic museum enterprise espoused a historical orientation, deepening the need for the memory of an archaic European civilization and, consequently, expounding reasons for decoding exotic and primitive objects as symbolic and contemporary signs of a Western antiquity. (61)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Ethnographic museums appropriated African artefacts in order to assimilate them in a play of otherness and sameness so that they speak to us as our contemporary history. Art museums assign these artefacts aesthetic qualities so that they speak as art. N\u00e9gritude attributes them with an alterity that refuses to be reduced to a Western gaze. This view of art is distinct from the understanding formed by institutionalized Western Art History, in which art has its place outside daily life, a detachment reflected by the spatial distinction of the museum (see K\u00f6nig 2007).<\/p>\n L\u2019art n\u00e8gre<\/em>, by contrast, is not only fundamentally entangled with life, but its ultimate function is to manifest l\u2019\u00e2me noire. <\/em>In other words, Damas identifies with the artefacts he sees in the museum and sees the imprisonment of African cultural heritage as an act of alienation in which museums took part. He writes:<\/p>\n my courage recovered Will they ever know this rancor in my heart Uprooting the masks from their cultural context and \u201cstealing the space that was mine\u201d functioned within the logics of cultural colonisation and alienation: this theft was French policy everywhere in the French empire, from the Afrique-\u00c9quatoriale fran\u00e7aise (AEF<\/em>) and Afrique-Occidentale fran\u00e7aise (AOF<\/em>) and in the Caribbean especially. Colonialism required this politics of assimilation.<\/p>\n Consequently, the poet of the post-colony first and foremost tries to recover and recuperate the loss. The idea of a \u201crestoration\u201d\u2014(redevenu moi-m\u00eame [\u2026] de ce que [\u2026] j\u2019\u00e9tais hier[\u2026]quand est venue l\u2019heure du d\u00e9racinement<\/em>)\u2014without hindering transformation into something \u201cnew\u201d (nouveau<\/em>) is typical to N\u00e9gritude. Yet the work of many of its members have nevertheless at times been considered traditionalist. However, in a context of alienation, nostalgia on the part of the victim is never far-off, as demonstrated by the succession of words in the poem:<\/p>\n the custom, the days, the life The \u201ccolonized heritage\u201d has been altered into \u201ccolonial heritage\u201d: the masks end up being decapitated from their costumes and their ritual meaning. Exhibited behind glass, they function within the knowledge\/power structure of the modernistic Weltanschauung<\/em> of the museum. The significance of museification is most drastically expressed in reference to Walter Benjamin\u2019s terminology from his famous essay \u201cThe Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction\u201d (1936): artefacts change from the modality of ritual-value to the modality of exposition-value in the context of reproducibility (248). Nevertheless, the decapitated masks are not dead. To paraphrase the canonical 1953 French film-essay on African art Statues Also Die <\/em>by Chris Marker, Alain Resnais, and Ghislain Cloquet, the masks still maintain the power to enchant, which is why they feature in De Groof\u2019s film.<\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n Figure 2: Still from Rendez-les-moi<\/em> (Give me back my black dolls<\/em>), 2013, 3\u2019 depicting Pierrot Barra\u2019s installation artwork \u201cAgw\u00e9.\u201d<\/p>\n Rendez-les-moi<\/em> attempts to fulfil a transatlantic cinematic restitution of the black dolls by incorporating Pierrot Barra\u2019s installation artwork \u201cAgw\u00e9.\u201d This contemporary piece by the Haitian artist Barra (1942-1999) has the form of a boat that carries dolls. On the boat, the film\u2019s viewers see Iwa Agwe, <\/em>a voodoo sea-spirit, represented as captain of the ship Imamou, <\/em>which brings the deceased back to their ancestral home of Africa. Barra\u2019s works were primarily intended to serve as \u201clittle altars\u201d for the initi\u00e9s<\/em>, the members of the hounfor <\/em>admiring and praying the loas<\/em> or voodoo pantheon. Syncretising West-African animist and Spirit religions with Catholicism and freemasonry, voodoo was developed by slaves in Saint-Domingue and was a supportive factor behind the Haitian revolution (1804) that secured the world\u2019s first Black Republic.[6]<\/a><\/p>\n Give me the illusion I will no longer have to satisfy One of the dolls shown in the film turns a closed eye on the word disdain<\/em>, accentuating its contempt. Damas, for his part, articulates the disdain that often accompanies mercy, as a sentiment projected by the colonizer onto the colonized. In \u201cLimb\u00e9\u201d he describes\/illustrates the disdainful mercy expressed for the dolls by a seemingly compassionate museum visitor. Damas demands to give him the illusion<\/em> that he could get rid of empty mercy and reanimate the dolls (and we acknowledge the fact that the dolls stand in as a metaphor for objectified women, who do not appear in the poem).<\/p>\n Give me back my black dolls In the poem, the word illusion<\/em> stresses the fatalist impossibility of what he asks: to get rid of a merciful and paralyzing attitude and to liberate his heritage from the museum in order to metamorphose it with new meaning\u2014his<\/em> meaning. The sad irony of Damas\u2019 work is that he cannot see past these dolls as objects: the chance of recuperation is tied to his own domination of them.<\/p>\n In the visual<\/em> poem however, spoken words connect with the medium of moving images. De Groof takes up Damas\u2019 wish to get the illusion, as explained above, across two phases in the film. First, a series of vertical shots (tilts) in parallel montage connects iron objects used to chain slaves (shown with downward tilts) and the black dolls (shown with upward tilts).<\/span>[7]<\/a> Second, the illusion of liberation through cinema develops in the final sequence where a succession of shots depicts artefacts in movement. Vertical and circular movements as well as abstract shots, detach the objects from their display, attempting to break these object free from their place in the museum and its connection with colonial history.<\/span><\/p>\n Figure 3: Still from Rendez-les-moi<\/em> (Give me back my black dolls<\/em>), 2013, 3\u2019, depicting G\u00e9rard Quenum\u2019s black dolls, Courtesy of the Artist.<\/p>\n By reading \u201cLimb\u00e9\u201d and other poems by Damas, we have tried to shed light on a particular metaphor used by the poet to denounce the process of dehumanization as defined in Aim\u00e9 C\u00e9saire\u2019s Discourse on Colonialism<\/em> (1950). The image of the black doll might also refer to the many artistic objects stolen by French ethnographers and explorers, visitors and art collectors, in the colonies. Moreover, the metaphoric black doll crosses different lines the poet wanted to abolish: between ages, sexes, races, and classes. The reading of this poem illustrates how much Damas\u2019 poetry can be amplified through close reading and artistic practice. De Groof\u2019s film presents an audio-visual interpretation of Damas\u2019 work. It may serve as an example of the ways in which Caribbean literature can inspire contemporary film art as a recuperative and reconciliatory strategy. Resulting films then offer new interpretations and thus encourage re-reading of Caribbean writers such as Damas.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Acknowledgments<\/strong>: This work was supported by the Foundation for Scientific Research-Flanders (FWO)<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Works Cited<\/strong><\/p>\n Amselle, Jean-Loup. Logiques me\u0301tisses: Anthropologie de l’identite\u0301 en Afrique et ailleurs<\/em>. Paris: Payot, 1990. Print.<\/p>\n —. Branchements: Anthropologie de l’universalite\u0301 des cultures<\/em>. Paris, Flammarion, 2001. Print.<\/p>\n Astruc, Alexandre, “Du stylo \u00e0 la cam\u00e9ra et de la cam\u00e9ra au stylo (Birth of a new avant-garde: le cam\u00e9ra-stylo).”<\/em> <\/strong>L’\u00c9cran fran\u00e7ais<\/em> 144 (1948): 324-8. Print.<\/p>\n Benjamin, Walter. \u201cThe Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.\u201d Illuminations<\/em>. New York: Schocken Books, 1977 [1936]. Print.<\/p>\n Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.”<\/em> New York: Routledge, 1993. Print.<\/p>\n Conroy-Kennedy, Elizabeth. The Negritude Poets: An Anthology of Translations from the French.<\/em> NY. Thunder\u2019s Mouth Press, 1989. 39-61. Print.<\/p>\n Damas, L\u00e9on-Gontran. Pigments, N\u00e9vralgies<\/em>. Trans. Lillehei. Paris: Pr\u00e9sence Africaine, 1972. Print.<\/p>\n —. Black-Label<\/em>, Paris: Gallimard, 1956. Print.<\/p>\n —. Derni\u00e8re escale<\/em>, posthumous edition, Paris: Regard du temps, 2012. Print.<\/p>\n Droixhe, Daniel. “Variations autour de Jazz-Band<\/em> (1922) de Robert Goffin.” Brussels: Acad\u00e9mie royale de langue et de litt\u00e9rature fran\u00e7aises de Belgique, 2007. Accessed 11 November 2011. (arllfb.be\/ebibliotheque\/communications\/droixhe100307.pdf)<\/p>\n Ezra, Elizabeth. The Colonial Unconscious: Race and Culture in Interwar France<\/em>. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2000. Print.<\/p>\n Glissant, Edouard. Discours antillais.<\/em> Paris, Seuil, 1981. Print.<\/p>\n Gyssels, Kathleen. \u201c\u2018Scandal\u2019: Queer avant la lettre (L\u00e9on Damas, James Baldwin).\u201d Queer. Ecritures de la diff\u00e9rence<\/em>. Ed. Pierre Zoberman. Paris: L\u2019Harmattan, 2008. 219-241. Print.<\/p>\n ———-. \u201cLa po\u00e9sie par le th\u00e9\u00e2tre avec L\u00e9on Damas.\u201d Emergences cara\u00efbes: une cr\u00e9ation th\u00e9\u00e2trale archip\u00e9lique, Africultures<\/em> 80\/81 (2010): 132-141. Print.<\/p>\n ———-. \u201cL\u00e9on-Gontran Damas et le mythe de l\u2019Am\u00e9rindien.\u201d Dalhousie French Studies<\/em> 86 (2009): 45-56. Print.<\/p>\n ———-. Passes et impasses dans le comparatisme carib\u00e9en postcolonial. Cinq traverses<\/em>.<\/p>\n Paris: Champion, 2010. Print.<\/p>\n Kesteloot, Lilyan. Ecrivains noirs d\u2019expression fran\u00e7aise<\/em>, Naissance d\u2019une litt\u00e9rature<\/em>. Brussels: ULB & Institut Solvay, 1963. Print.<\/p>\n K\u00f6nig, Amy H. “Where do Statues go when they die? On Art, Colonialism and Complicity: Thoughts after Seeing Les Statues Meurent Aussi<\/em> (Statues Also Die<\/em>), a Film by Alain Resnais and Chris Marker.” h2so4<\/em> 14 (2007). Accessed 11 November 2011.<\/p>\n Larsen, Nella. Passing<\/em>. New York, London: A. A. Knopf, 1929. Print.<\/p>\n Lillehei, Alexandra. 2011. Pigments<\/em> in Translation<\/em>, online thesis for Wesleyan University. Accessed 11 November 2011. http:\/\/wesscholar.wesleyan.edu\/etd_hon_theses\/706\/<\/p>\n Marker, Chris, Alain Resnais, and Ghislain Cloquet. Statues Also Die <\/em>(Les statues meurent aussi<\/em>), <\/em>Pr\u00e9sence Africaine, 30\u2019, 1953. Film.<\/p>\n Michel, Jean-Claude. Les \u00e9crivains noirs et le surr\u00e9alisme<\/em>. Sherbrooke, Que\u0301bec: Naaman, 1982. Print.<\/p>\n Mudimbe, V. Y. The Idea of Africa<\/em>. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. Print.<\/p>\n Perret, Thierry; Carr\u00e9, Nathalie and Philippe, Nathalie, Les grandes voix du Sud<\/em>, vol 2, RFI \/ CulturesFrance: Fr\u00e9meaux & Associ\u00e9s, 2007. Print.<\/p>\n Salkey, Andrew. An Island Post. Stories from the Caribbean<\/em>, Liveright, 1970. Print.<\/p>\n —. Breaklight. Poets of the Caribbean<\/em>, Anchor Books, 1973. Print.<\/p>\n Senghor, L\u00e9opold S\u00e9dar, Anthologie \u00e0 la nouvelle po\u00e9sie n\u00e8gre et malgache<\/em>, Paris, PUF, 1948. Print.<\/p>\n —. Libert\u00e9 III<\/em>, Paris: Seuil, 1977. Print.<\/p>\n —. Hosties Noires<\/em>. Collection “Pierres Vives”. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1948. Print.<\/p>\n Stratchan, John. \u201cDogon as lieux de m\u00e9moire.\u201d Accessed 11 Nov 2012. http:\/\/eprints.lancs.ac.uk\/67467\/1\/DOGON_OF_MALI_REF_VERSION.PDF<\/p>\n Walker, Keith. Countermodernism and Francophone Literary Cultures: the Game of Slipknot<\/em>, Dunham, Duke UP, 1999. Print.<\/p>\n Warner, Keith Q., ed. Critical Perspectives on L\u00e9on-Gontran Damas,<\/em> Washington: Three Continents Press, 1988. Print.<\/p>\n Wastiau, Boris. Medusa: The African Sculpture of Enchantment<\/em>, Gene\u0300ve: Muse\u0301e d’ethnographie de Gene\u0300ve, 2008. Print.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Image Notes.<\/strong><\/p>\n Figure 1: Still from Rendez-les moi<\/em> (Give me back my black dolls<\/em>), 2013, 3\u2019<\/p>\n Figure 2:\u00a0Still from Rendez-les moi<\/em> (Give me back my black dolls<\/em>), 2013, 3\u2019 depicting Pierrot Barra\u2019s installation artwork \u201cAgw\u00e9\u201d.<\/p>\n Figure 3: Still from Rendez-les moi<\/em> (Give me back my black dolls<\/em>), 2013, 3\u2019, depicting G\u00e9rard Quenum\u2019s black dolls, Courtesy of the Artist.<\/p>\n <\/a>Notes<\/strong><\/p>\n [1]<\/a> A strong theme recurrently reappearing in Harlem Renaissance poetry. See Gyssels Kathleen, \u201cDamas et McKay : les d\u00e9mons blancs\u201d, Riveneuve Continents<\/em> (automne-hiver 2008-2009), Hors-S\u00e9rie, Harlem Heritage: 219-227. Gyssels, Kathleen, \u201cCorrespondances et consonances: Bois-d\u2019Eb\u00e8ne <\/em>et Black-Label\u201d<\/em>, in R\u00e9volte, subversion et d\u00e9veloppement chez Jacques Roumain<\/em>, Acacia, Michel, ed., Port-au-Prince, Editions de l\u2019Universit\u00e9 d\u2019Etat d\u2019Ha\u00efti, 2009\u00a0: 231-244.<\/p>\n [2]<\/a> Trained as ethnographer and a pupil of Marcel Mauss and Paul Rivet, L\u00e9on-Gontran Damas moves beyond a third Line, the enduring diff\u00e9rend <\/em>around the issue of independence of the French Antilles and French Guiana. A strong opponent to the vote of \u201cd\u00e9partementalisation\u201d launched by C\u00e9saire in 1946, Damas would forever remain the rebel, the \u201cmaroon\u201d who does not fit in the triangle of the more Francophile first Black member of the Acad\u00e9mie fran\u00e7aise (Senghor) and life-long mayor of Fort-de-France, C\u00e9saire. In his accessible poetry, as well as in Retour de Guyane<\/em> (1938), his subversive portrayal of his mother country in his censored travel report on the results of French infiltration in French Guyana, Damas protested fiercely against the d\u00e9partementalisation<\/em> supported by Aim\u00e9 C\u00e9saire and fellow Cayenese intellectuals such as Gaston Monnerville and F\u00e9lix Ebou\u00e9. Rejecting the status of \u201cd\u00e9partement d’outre-mer\u201d for his own country and the neighbouring French islands, Damas was convinced this status between autonomy and dependence would enhance a neo-colonial regime holding the populations in a dreadful double bind.<\/em> In line with Frantz Fanon, Damas believed that as citizens of France, they would always remain outlaws because of their origin and skin colour. Finally, his withdrawal from politics and his distancing from the N\u00e9gritude movement contributed to his isolation.<\/p>\n [3]<\/a> The \u201cGalibi\u201d are one of the many Amerindian tribes living in French Guiana.<\/p>\n [4]<\/a> ifaa-platform.org<\/p>\n https:\/\/vimeo.com\/70741130<\/a>\u00a0(pasword: bergendal)<\/p>\n https:\/\/vimeo.com\/70731876<\/a>\u00a0(pasword: bergendal)<\/p>\n [5]<\/a> \u201cStole\u201d is not strong enough a translation for \u201ccambrioler.\u201d In The N\u00e9gritude Poets<\/em>, An Anthology of Translations from the French <\/em>(1989 [1975]), Conroy-Kennedy, the verb \u201ccambrioler\u201d gives the stringent equivalent \u201cransacking\u201d (Conroy-Kennedy 1989: 39-61). For Kesteloot, the first essayist to illustrate the entire movement (Kesteloot 1963), the first poems by Damas indeed had a particularly insolent and incisive character. Again the verb has not the stringent corporeal meaning of \u201cfouiller\u201d (nor of \u201ccambrioler\u201d it is: \u201ccamber\u201d being close to \u201cchamber,\u201d the intimate space where atrocities are going on between white master and black slave). Lillehei weakens Damas\u2019 irritation by translating \u201cstole\u201d instead of \u201cransacked.\u201d<\/p>\n [6]<\/a> octobergallery.co.uk\/exhibitions\/2007voy\/index.shtml<\/p>\nI. The Damas of Give Me Back My Black Dolls<\/em><\/h4>\n
\n
\ntom
\ntom
\nrolled from
\nrhythm
\nto
\nrhythm
\nthe frenzy<\/p>\n
\nthe frenzy of hands
\nthe frenzy
\nof statues\u2019 feet
\nSINCE
\nhow many of ME ME ME
\nhave died
\nsince they came that night when the
\ntom
\ntom
\nrolled from
\nrhythm
\nto
\nrhythm
\nthe frenzy
\n(\u201cThey Came that Night\u201d)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n
<\/p>\nII. Rendez-les-moi\u00a0: <\/em><\/strong>\u201cGive me back my black dolls\u201d through moving pictures<\/strong><\/h4>\n
\nso they dispel
\nthe image of pale whores
\nmerchants of love who stroll back and forth
\non the boulevard of my ennui<\/p>\n
\nso they dispel
\nthe eternal image
\nthe hallucinatory image
\nof stacked large-assed puppets
\nwhose miserable mercy
\nthe wind carries to the nose
\n(\u201cLimb\u00e9\u201d)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\nmy audacity
\nI become myself once again
\nmyself once more
\nout of what I was Yesterday
\nyesterday
\nwithout complexity
\nyesterday
\nwhen the hour of uprooting came<\/p>\n
\nOpened to the eye of my mistrust too late
\nthey stole the space that was mine
\n<\/a>(\u201cLimb\u00e9\u201d)[5]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\nthe song, the rhythm, the effort
\nthe path, the water, the huts
\nthe smoke gray earth
\nthe wisdom, the words, the discussion
\nthe elders
\nthe cadence, the hands, the tempo, the hands
\nthe stampings of feet
\nthe ground
\n(\u201cLimb\u00e9\u201d)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/p>\n
\nthe sprawling need
\nof mercies snoring
\nbeneath the world\u2019s unconscious disdain
\n(\u201cLimb\u00e9\u201d)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\nso that I can play with them
\nthe na\u00efve games of my instinct
\nwhich has remained in the shadow of its laws
\n(\u201cLimb\u00e9\u201d)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/p>\nIII Concluding Thoughts<\/strong><\/h5>\n