The poetic war machine: Notebook of a Return to the Native Land

MARIA ALEJANDRA PORTELA

Rio de Janeiro

Congreso; XVIII Congreso Internacional de Literatura Comparada; 2007

Literature and politics can establish solid and paradoxically creative/destructive symbiotic relationships. When the world is too hideous to contemplate, to respect or to honor, some generations of poets have vehemently and wildly voiced their disgust and conducted literary wars against the wastes of . . . insane nationalisms. 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-poets, 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, which represent some of the most violent and painful howls at the ruins of civilization.