“The Intuitive Lianas of My Hands”

Frantz Fanon famously reacted to Jean-Paul Sartre’s appropriation of Negritude with the assertion that he would rebuild it with his hands, working intuitively to regrow Black subjectivity as if in the coiling form of the liana tree. Fanon’s reference to the “lianes intuitives” suggests at once a primary, sensory activity and a complicity with a plant form that symbolizes creative interweaving. This essay takes Fanon’s response to Negritude as a starting point for an analysis of the figure of the liana as a symbol of relationality and transformation in the work of Suzanne and Aimé Césaire, where the “homme-plante” embedded in the ecosystem represents a salutary environmental ethics.