Qui et quels nous sommes? The Poetics of Address in Aimé Césaire's Cahier d'un retour au pays natal and Edward Kamau Brathwaite's The Arrivants

Abstract: Aimé Césaire's Cahier and Edward Kamau Brathwaite's The Arrivants are well known for their lexical technicality, neologisms and other stylistic opacities. However, both texts combine this expressive ipseity with a poetics of address that locates social and subjective renewal in a mutual agreement to experiment. This essay examines their combinations of ambiguity and address to produce an innovative and indeterminate collective "nous" or "we" in whose superpositional embrace they posit individual and social transformation. It argues that the two poets use this poetics of address to offer aesthetic innovation as an answer to the anti-colonial injunction to represent decolonized subjects.