REVIEW: The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire
We recommend The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire
By the mid-1940s, Suzanne Roussi Césaire was the founder of a major Caribbean anti-colonial periodical, ardent proponent of the pan-Africanist négritude movement, and writer of several essays and poems on the surrealist avant-garde. In 1966, she died prematurely as a new émigré in Paris, leaving only a fraction of her literary legacy behind — the rest of which she had burned in the years prior. In the wake of the Second World War, Césaire, a feminist writer from the French colony of Martinique, embraced French surrealism as a literary movement because it could metabolize both the Vichy occupation and the postcolonial desire to break free of a French colonial, assimilationist regime. Surrealism offered a way for these ambivalent political impulses to coexist. Surrealism was also what allowed filmmaker Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich to make a film about the inimitable Césaire, a formidable political figure who, as Natalie Meade wrote in Issue #8, didn’t want to be remembered.
Hunt-Ehrlich’s The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire struggles openly with the hardships of representing a figure who deliberately evaded representations. For the most part, we don’t even see Césaire, only the actor playing her — Zita Hanrot — recollecting and reciting Césaire’s words, puzzling over the idea of making a movie about the poet and mother of six, and reflecting on motherhood and artistry. Hunt-Ehrlich patchworks dialogue taken from Césaire’s essays, interviews with her descendants, letters, and research to recover her artistic life.
The film is shot in the lush overgrown marshes of Florida, made to look like a pre-independence Martinique. Dense thickets intrude into scenes and unpredictable rain drives the film crew away. The environment is inviting but strange and dangerous too. In Césaire’s essay “Le Grand Camouflage,” from which Hunt-Ehrlich takes most of her dialogue, surrealism was a way to defamiliarise the colonial narratives that had become ingrained in Martinicans and disguise this critique into nonfiction. She speaks of the spectacular, peaceful beauty of the island as a familiar colonial trap, which obscures the destructive history of slavery and colonialism. Césaire was compelled not by beauty but by the environmental catastrophe of the French Antilles. “Obsessed with images of war,” her writings revealed the simultaneous violence and protection of camouflage. It was camouflage that allowed her to distribute political criticism and reveal to fellow Martinicans the call for revolution emanating from the land. It is camouflage that Hunt-Ehrlich investigates, letting the writer’s hidden self and writing be available for rediscovery without reduction. Hunt-Ehrlich’s Ballad treats all of Césaire’s difficult politics with care and leaves Césaire’s story as she wanted it: in fragments. —Jahnavi Mehta