Howls in the Lands of Aborted Dreams: Aimé Césairre and Allen Ginsberg

Abstract

In the twentieth century, one can find some of the most illuminating examples of artistic protest and social commitment such as the works by the English antiwar soldier-poets1, the Harlem Renaissance group, modernists like Yeats and Eliot, the Angry Young Men, the Beats, the Black Mountain Poets, the négritude movement, counter-culture artists and, lately, postcolonial writers, among others. In this paper, I will focus on two works, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land (Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, 1939) by Aimé Césaire and Howl (1956) by Allen Ginsberg. As literary history has shown, there are certain works -or counter-texts- that not only reject the oppressive forces of cultural imperialism but also defy conventional literary analysis. Usually, these counter-texts disseminate overflowing connotations and images, undermine and destabilize fixed theoretical categories and resist interpretation based upon pre-determined critical paradigms. Taking this into account, my central contention is that both Césaire’s Notebook and Ginsberg’s Howl—in spite of belonging to different geographical, historical and aesthetic contexts—display formal, thematic and politically concordant features, which represent some of the most violent and painful howls at the ruins of civilization.