Anny-Dominique Curtius, *Suzanne Césaire: Archéologie littéraire et artistique d'une mémoire empêchée*. Paris: Karthala, 2020. 395 pp. (Paper US$59.73)

Can a writer speak outside of her time? Certainly not in the way that some people imagine the “classics” to speak at all times, but perhaps at different times, in ways unimaginable at the time of writing. What if a writer speaks despite the writing? Both of these possibilities seem to be the case of Suzanne Césaire, and Anny-Dominique Curtius offers us a map and a territory for us to understand the out-of-time texture of that writing and the use of the person despite the writing—in this case writing from the early 1940s when Suzanne was a partner with others in the creation of the intellectual riches of the journal *Tropiques*.

*Suzanne Césaire: Archeology littéraire et artistique d'une mémoire empêchée* begins with two aporias. The first is a question posed by a fellow scholar: would we be writing about Suzanne if Aimé had not become a giant of letters? Despite the concern trolling inherent in that question, Curtius accepts it and proposes a maybe. The second aporia comes via Roland Barthes, in the duality of photography, being both a moment captured in a specific time that will never be again, and its perpetual openness to interpretation and manipulation in its future. A surprising framework for a book on the reception history of Suzanne Césaire at first, but one that makes sense as the chapters unfold, since photos of Suzanne and her phantasmatic presence will occupy all chapters but the last. At stake is how Suzanne is made to serve several roles in the interpretations of others, from enigmatic doudou to foundational thinker.

The arc of the book, in fact, depends on that journey, since the final and quite convincing argument is that Suzanne Césaire is an original thinker precisely because she reactively and preemptively was able to connect her fight against gendered exoticism with ecological and anticolonial political concerns. This is the gambit the book makes, and ultimately succeeds at in my reading of it. Curtius is able to make of Suzanne a relevant “intersectional” thinker for us in 2021, even if she was ignored in her own time. We praise thinkers and activists today who can think class, gender, race, sexuality, and environment in the same breath, without subordinating one to the other, and the Suzanne Césaire that emerges out of Curtius’s analysis provides a great precursor to these capacious thinkers.

Chapter 1 looks very closely at the polysemies of visual representations of Suzanne, probably more than all the other chapters. Curtius starts with the picture on the cover of *Tropiques* itself, and moves on to a cadre of media and venues, looking at pictures used in gallery pamphlets, documentaries, book covers, and more. This is the domain of the enigmatic, doudou Suzanne, eluding the men who use her likeness. The second chapter deals with the name

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of Suzanne as it appears in the writings, public and private, of several men of letters, from the muse she becomes for André Breton to the image of a savage nature she will be for Michel Leiris. Chapter 3 looks at Suzanne's presence in the documentary of Arlette Pacquit, *Hommage à Suzanne Roussi-Césaire* (2004), and the relationship with Aimé, glimpsed at from several documentary sources, including Aimé's poems—connecting several of these for the first time to Suzanne. The fourth chapter looks at Daniel Maximin, *Suzanne Césaire, fontaine solaire*, and Huguette Bellemare *et alii, Suzanne Roussi Césaire: une femme sur tous les fronts 1915-2015*, which Curtius uses as an opportunity to convince us of the importance of rehabilitating Suzanne Césaire. Finally, Curtius concludes this reception history, this “archeology,” of the likeness and name of Suzanne with Suzanne’s own reply, avant-la-lettre, in the early 1940s. She does this through a reading of “the great camouflage”—which wavers in Curtius’s reading between lucidity and opacity or camouflage, in a “*liane-dialectique*” (“dialectic of the liana”). Curtius succeeds in reading for us an original thinker of Caribbean ecopoetics, as Curtius herself has called Suzanne in previous work.

In tracing this arc, Curtius also convinces us that in their own time, in those early 1940s, the partnership between the Césaires and the other members of the *Tropiques* team was one of equal contributors with overlapping ideas, with their own differences, and not at all beholden to the leadership of Aimé. This last bit seems right to me, since hindsight often tends to obscure our readings of this period because Aimé would become the monumental world literature figure he is today. Curtius’s “maybe” makes sense in light of a literary history that seeks histories that didn’t always predict their own fames.

Alex Gil

Faculty of Digital Humanities, Yale University, New Haven CT, U.S.A.

alex.gil@yale.edu