The Red Hour of Miracles: Aimé Césaire’s And the Dogs Were Silent

The Haitian revolution was the first victorious anti-colonial war in the so-called New World led by those enslaved by the colonizers. The battle engaged against the slavers and their empires was long and bloody. European kings and European republics fought and lost. In doing so, the latter revealed their colonialist and white supremacist similarities to the kings they had overthrown in the name of a republican freedom. Arguably, the nation of Haiti continues to suffer for that fact. Begun in 1791, the war lasted until 1804. The anti-colonial forces maintained a general cohesion over the years of struggle, occasionally aligning themselves with different European powers to obtain weapons and other kinds of support. Its lessons include the positives and negatives of seeking and accepting support of that nature. It is perhaps best understood in terms of its inspirational meanings. Most important of those is that a revolutionary struggle can defeat a more powerful and wealthier power even against great odds.

Aimé Césaire was a citizen of the Caribbean island Martinique, who is known internationally for his writing. Two of his works stand out as international classics of anti-colonialism. One, titled Discourse on Colonialism explored European colonialism and its destructive effects on the culture, politics and economies of the colonized. The other work that continues to have an important place in anti-colonial and post-colonial studies and movements is his adaptation of the Shakespeare play The Tempest. This work, titled Une Tempeté redefines Shakespeare’s drama into what professor and critic Helen Scott calls an “irreverent rewriting of Shakespeare’s Tempest, with Caliban, portrayed by colonialist writers as the natural savage, recast as a defiant freedom fighter.” Césaire was a political activist until he died in 2008. One of his last publicized acts was to refuse to meet with future French president Nicholas Sarkozy because of his support for a French law that required teachers and textbooks to put a positive spin on French colonialism in the classroom.

Besides the two works mentioned above, Césaire published several other works and helped found and edit the journal Tropiques. In addition, there were other works that were not published (at least not in English) during his lifetime. One of these latter works, titled And the Dogs Were Silent (Et les Chiens se Tausaient), was recently published by the University of North Carolina Press. It is a drama about the Haitian revolution. The publication includes the French version and an English translation by Alex Gil, who keeps the rhythm and styling of the French intact. Written in 1943 during the (Nazi) Vichy regime in the French department of Martinique, the play was published in a different version in 1946. It disappeared a couple years later. Alex Gil discusses this and subsequent history in his introduction to this text. Suffice it to say for this review, this 2024 version is a different work from that of 1946.

The play itself is a fairly linear telling of the Haitian revolution. Toussaint L’Ouverture is the main protagonist with the Haitian people in the main supporting role. A blend of historical fact and fancy, the myths of the Haitian spiritual practices and the practical demands of war and politics are part and parcel of the story played out in the work’s pages. Dramatically, the style is reminiscent of Bertolt Brecht, the dramatic works of Amiri Baraka and Peter Weiss’s Marat/Sade. The politics are clearly anti-imperialist and represent the concept of Negritude, which Césaire championed and is considered to be one of the concept’s “fathers.” Borrowing the words of the Senegalese poet and politician Léopold Sédar Sengho, Negritude is “the sum of the cultural values of the black world as they are expressed in the life, the institutions, and the works of black men.” When combined with Césaire’s leftist politics, And the Dogs Became Silent is by definition a revolutionary and subversive work.

Indeed, it is a rally cry and a call to arms. The struggle for freedom from slavery and empire is the essence of this drama. The battle engaged and the calls to maintain an eye on the prize is in the text of the work and the understanding of it. Neither Césaire or his characters—from L’Ouverture to the Chorus—make any pretense that the path to the freedom he describes and his protagonists act out on stage is a simple or direct one. This honesty is what helps maintain the revolutionary understanding that is the foundation of the work. Likewise, it is also the actual history of the revolutionary struggle from which the text was created. Simultaneously beautiful, brutal, inspirational and frightening, And the Dogs Were Silent is a drama to be reckoned with.

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