Don’t Let Sleeping Dogs Lie

In Engagements with Aimé Césaire: Thinking with Spirits, Jason Allen-Paisant explores how Aimé Césaire’s work conjures ancestral and intellectual “spirits” to challenge colonial structures and generate new visions of freedom. This spectral engagement enables what Allen-Paisant calls a “temporal poetics,” wherein past, present, and future coalesce through art to provoke cultural and political transformations. These temporal folds are acutely present in . . . . . . And the Dogs Were Silent (. . . . . . And the Dogs Were Silent) a poetic drama written by Césaire during the Vichy regime in Martinique and now newly translated by Alex Gil and presented in a bilingual edition from Duke University Press (2024).

The choice of text itself has an interesting history. . . . . . . And the Dogs Were Silent, with its six opening dots, refers to a manuscript of Césaire’s play finished at the end of 1943 and rediscovered by Gil in a municipal library in France in 2008. Although related to the play Et les chiens se taisent published in 1946, Gil makes the argument, in both his exegesis and with the translation itself, for the recovery of the 1943 text because it not only revises our understanding of Césaire’s literary development, it also restores a foundational anticolonial document to the history of Black theatre and radical thought.

Indeed, Gil’s introduction highlights the relationship between Césaire’s trajectory and the play’s genealogy. Composed in secrecy under the Vichy regime in Martinique, the play is markedly different from its later, abstracted iterations. Gil writes: “Not to be confused with the similarly titled dramatic poem published in 1946 [. . .] this earlier version is an explicit historical drama based on the Haitian Revolution” (2). Gill adds, “The 1946 Gallimard version, labeled a Tragédie, erases historical markers and revolutionary violence, turning Toussaint Louverture into ‘the Rebel’ in a surreal, non-specific setting” (6–7), while the 1943 play stages a clear and violent rejection of colonial oppression—most provocatively through the recurring revolutionary cry mort aux blancs (“death to the whites”)—and portrays Toussaint Louverture as a republican hero unwavering in his pursuit of freedom.

Yet Césaire himself rejected the 1943 version. Gil writes,

At the end of 1943, a few months after the collapse of the Vichy regime in Martinique, Césaire sent a complete carbon-copied typescript of . . . . . . And the Dogs Were Silent rife with handwritten revisions, to celebrated French surrealist André Breton, who was living in New York at the time. A few months later, Césaire regretted his decision and asked Breton to discard the text “a draft.” He claimed that he needed to erase history from it, erase its “theme.” (4)

Despite Césaire’s later disavowal of this iteration, the play survived in the hands of Césaire’s earliest English translator, Yvon Goll, who never translated the play, but left it in the collection of archivist Albert Rosin. And so the play’s history comes into the present moment, and through the layers of text and translation, Gil invites us to consider what Césaire might have meant by history and its erasure. “This was the kind of find that changed what we thought about Césaire. Not only he started writing for the theater much earlier than we had all assumed, but his first foray was a brazen three-act historical drama based on the Haitian Revolution!” (2–3). In his exegesis and translation, Gil clearly traces the shifting historical and literary contours of the play. Gil’s introduction lays out his journey as researcher and translator, documenting his decade-long work leading to a realization of the value of the work.

As Gil rigorously historicizes the play’s trajectory from 1943 onwards, we begin to understand the genesis of Césaire’s anticolonial formulations. We know that Césaire and Fanon were some of the most unforgiving theorists of colonial violence. We also know that Césaire had already completed and published Notebook of a Return to the Native Land in 1939. The agitation that he expresses in the Notebook fed into writing . . . . . . And the Dogs Were Silent. For in 1943, a young Césaire was engaged in formulating his ideas about the colonial condition and particularly how it had manifested in Haiti. This young version of Césaire wrote a play that was markedly different from the version that we read today.

In his foreword, Brent Hayes Edwards situates . . . . . . And the Dogs Were Silent within Césaire’s broader corpus and the Negritude movement, which sought to reclaim Black identity and aesthetics from colonial erasure as well as a response to colonial assimilation and racism. Edwards draws attention to the figure of the Rebel, who embodies both a singular and collective voice of resistance. This existential position—between speech and silence, ethics and violence—highlights the contradictions of decolonization. Edwards also emphasizes Césaire’s experimental form, reading the play’s poetic discontinuities as acts of formal rebellion against colonial narrative structures. For Césaire, it is a prophetic poetics that he employs to collapse time, linking the Haitian Revolution to contemporary anticolonial and Black liberation struggles.

Edwards’ framing in the foreword also provides critical scaffolding for new readers of Césaire. He not only historicizes the play but also draws links between its structure and the fractured political geography of the Black diaspora. His reading underscores that the text is not simply a product of postwar Martinique but part of a transnational tradition of Black insurgent thought—a tradition that speaks urgently to contemporary movements for racial justice, from Haiti to Ferguson, from Port-au-Prince to Johannesburg.

In Césaire’s political and literary thought, the work of theater lay in its most visual element. The power of performance could, according to Césaire, unlock newer ways of seeing the self. This was crucial for drawing attention to the conditions of political oppression. Using his imaginative and evocative language, he breaks conventional boundaries, as a call to solidarity among all who suffer under oppressive regimes. By invoking a shared human experience and a collective struggle for liberation, Césaire contributes to a broader discourse on universal human rights and on ongoing solidarity among the wretched of the earth. In a way, his work continues to inspire those seeking justice and equality across different cultures and contexts. In the visualization of anticolonial drama on stage lay the potential, for Césaire, to generate anticolonial consciousness.

In line with the scholarly work begun by Susan Buck-Morss, this text centers the work of Haitian revolutionary praxis and how Haiti became the first Black nation. The cost of this national liberation was very high, given that Haiti’s economic position on the global scale has continued to suffer as the result of multiple historical and political injustices. In expelling the French, the Haitian Revolution set up a complex example of anticolonial struggle. . . . . . . And the Dogs Were Silent centers on a figure modeled on Toussaint Louverture, the radical leader of the Haitian Revolution. The play follows Toussaint’s radical leadership as he resists temptations to betray his comrades, is captured, and is sent to France. There he dies without obtaining freedom, but, at the end of the play, in a sort of coda, his spirit returns to help bring Jacques Desaline to victory. Philosophically, the play’s engagement with Louverture resonates with Buck-Morss’s re-reading of Hegel in Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History, in which she argues that the Haitian Revolution was foundational to modern ideas of freedom but remains excluded from European philosophy. Césaire, like Buck-Morss, insists that Black revolutionary agency must be re-centered in global intellectual history.

In essence, Césaire uses Louverture’s historical role to shed light on the “colonial problem”—the contradiction of European Enlightenment values coexisting with brutal colonial systems. Césaire’s analysis calls for a reevaluation of history, encouraging an understanding of the Haitian Revolution not just as an isolated event, but as a pivotal moment in the global struggle for justice, equality, and freedom from colonial subjugation. He also emphasizes the importance of the Haitian Revolution in the context of Black liberation and in the fight against racial oppression. Césaire’s exploration of Louverture’s actions serves as a critique of how European powers, while promoting an image of human rights and civilization, simultaneously perpetuated a system of exploitation, dehumanization, and violence in their colonies. Through Louverture’s story, Césaire invites readers to reconsider the true meaning of the Enlightenment, questioning whether the supposed universal values of freedom and justice could ever truly be realized within the framework of colonialism and how the fight for independence and dignity necessitated confronting these very contradictions. In so doing, Césaire frames the “colonial problem” not merely as a political issue but as a moral and philosophical one, asking fundamental questions about the nature of power, humanity, and justice in the modern world.

Indeed, its title alone, . . . . . . And the Dogs Were Silent, evokes a fraught metaphor of subjugation. This title comes from Césaire’s concern with the history of Haiti, and the ways in which its revolution changed that nation forever. Haiti was simply silenced. Dogs, traditionally symbols of loyalty or vigilance, here suggest enforced silence and terror—recalling their deployment in slave patrols and colonial violence. In Afro-Dog: Blackness and the Animal Question, Bénédicte Boisseron reminds us how dogs have served to dehumanize Black bodies while also becoming emblems of Black resistance. Césaire’s silenced dogs mark both submission and the latent potential for revolt. This muteness is powerfully subverted by the figure of Toussaint Louverture, whose revolutionary defiance breaks through this enforced quiet. Louverture, as portrayed in the play, is alienated not only from colonial power but from his own people—misunderstood, isolated, yet driven by a vision of Black freedom. His philosophical reflections render the struggle for liberation both collective and deeply personal.

This process of erasure and rewriting resonates deeply with Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s argument in Silencing the Past (1995) that the Haitian Revolution was not merely forgotten but actively silenced by a historical apparatus unable—or unwilling—to process Black radical agency and the reality of enslaved people overthrowing a colonial empire. The disappearance and later recovery of Césaire’s original play not only exemplify Trouillot’s concept of archival silence but also reveal the tensions between political survival, aesthetic strategy, and historical truth in the production of anticolonial art. In recovering and translating this text, Gil reopens a space for the revolutionary memory that Trouillot argued had been systemically suppressed in the Western historical imagination.

Césaire’s engagement with the figure of Louverture must also be situated within the longue durée of Black Atlantic intellectual history. Louverture is not simply a revolutionary symbol; he becomes a metaphysical site through which Césaire explores the contradictions of freedom. The Rebel in the play does not speak from a position of triumph but from within a crucible of self-doubt, isolation, and unresolved trauma. This positioning complicates conventional heroic narratives and foregrounds the cost of revolutionary integrity. Thus the idea of silence in the play is not just political; it is ontological. Césaire’s poetics of silence speaks to the condition of being rendered invisible, a theme also explored by theorists such as Christina Sharpe in her work on the ‘wake’ of slavery. Silence becomes both an imposed condition and a strategy of endurance—a space where pain is preserved and where voice is incubated. Césaire does not merely lament this silence; he mines it for possibilities of poetic rupture.

Césaire’s very style addresses this rupture. . . . . . . And the Dogs Were Silent unfolds in fragments, poetic monologues, and surrealist imagery. It recalls his Discourse on Colonialism (1956) not only in its political vision but in its formal disruption of European literary expectations as well as a critique of colonialism. Grappling with issues of whether social change (desire for freedom) and cultural rejuvenation are possible for colonized peoples, Césaire’s very syntax raises crucial questions: Is there an epistemology for new ways of being free? Can language be used as a new tool for reflection and a new grammar for the colonized subject in the world? By engaging with the possibilities of this new epistemology, Césaire’s language creates a powerful tool for understanding and confronting the lingering effects of colonial rule and calls on colonized peoples to speak out and to make themselves visible. He opens the door to a language capable of articulating the experiences of freedom within Blackness.

Gil’s translation of . . . . . . And the Dogs Were Silent illustrates how Césaire’s radical language functions as a form of cultural reclamation and resistance. It is an embodiment of Césaire’s unwavering commitment to voice the oppressed realities, incite introspection, and inspire transformative action. With all of this at stake, it is essential that Gil’s translation is able to attend to the linguistic and philological demands that of a text that is not only recovered, but which also contains politically charged vocabulary that cannot be translated with direct semantic equivalence. What happens to dense political writing when the translator must confront old and tired anxieties of meaning getting lost in translation? Gil’s introduction addresses these questions with the nuanced analysis of a seasoned translator:

How to capture, then, this reappropriation in the context of a poetic text that relies on the act of repetition with a difference? Where Toussaint mirrors back to France its republican language to surface its hypocrisy? Where Césaire is attempting the epochal reversal of a loaded term in the context of a world war? (6)

Here, Gil demonstrates the political and the historical work that is performed by the translator. Gil’s translation embraces this complexity, preserving the lyrical density and philosophical depth of Césaire’s original play. Rather than simplifying, Gil renders Césaire’s language as a poetic archive of revolt.

Gil writes, “I wanted to recover a more fiery Césaire, a man who wrote dangerous words at a time when speaking honestly and directly in public could cost him dearly. These goals, more than anything else, seal my choices (38). Happily, his sensitivity to rhythm and repetition allows the English text to breathe with the same intensity as the French, retaining the play’s affective and political charge. The translation is especially commendable in how it handles Césaire’s experimental use of metaphor and enjambment. Where the French original deploys ellipses and rhetorical breaks to suggest fragmentation and hesitancy, the English version retains these rhythmic disjunctions. In doing so, it preserves the play’s affective tension, rendering it a faithful yet interpretively open document of decolonial struggle.

As Venuti has theorized, the work that translations can do exists both at the instrumental and hermeneutic scale. In this translation, Gil has combined the two scales, where the former has to do with the immediate act of translation and the latter raises unanswerable research questions through translation. Gil’s work brings these approaches together to demonstrate a brilliant translation that shines in its collaborative invitation, historical intervention, literary contribution, and delightful narrative of archival detection.

In sum, Gil presents us with a text that continues to infinitely expand literary horizons. The reader is left with a sense of having taken this journey with the translator. Gil clearly notes why it was important to translate this play:

I edited and translated the text because I believe we need it now. I wanted to highlight a historical prophecy of Black redemption that becomes true; to offer a text that fights against the doublespeak of colonialism because the ruses of that discourse continue to haunt us today. Césaire’s Toussaint remains uncannily relevant to France’s current incarnation of republicanism—just as obsessed with secularism and universalism, just as willfully blind to its own coloniality and racism. (37–38)

Gil’s text intervenes then in both literary history and translation theory. When Gil gives us the history of this play, it calls into question the idea of faithfulness with which translation theorists continue to critically engage. How do we judge faithfulness when the text itself has undergone multiple revisions and iterations? Gil’s translation compels the reader to ask why these iterations were necessary in the first place and what can they tell even the student in an undergraduate classroom about the movement of Cesaire’s anticolonial thought. Faithfulness, then, becomes a fraught question.

The work of translation in anticolonial texts tends to carry a re-interpretive charge. In this case as well, the re-emergence of this text through a bilingual translation allows the reader to experience the movement of the text both on the page and discursively. In reading the French and the English on the same page, we as readers are offered a collaborative space where Gil invites us to be a part of the translation process. Regardless of whether the reader has both English and French, this collaborative exercise renders Césaire a rediscovery in the manner that is often made possible through translation.

. . . . . . And the Dogs Were Silent thus functions as a critical intervention in both Francophone and Anglophone literary traditions. It belongs to a corpus of radical Black performance literature that includes the writings of Frantz Fanon, Amílcar Cabral, and Wole Soyinka, each of whom, in different ways, used dramatic form to challenge imperial grammars. Césaire’s synthesis of surrealist form and Caribbean political consciousness creates a genre-defiant text that resists domestication by Western theatrical norms. We are in the middle of a scholarly resurgence of Césaire’s literary, poetic, and political thought. We are witnessing how his work, which has always been powerful, is now gaining more purchase as the idea of decoloniality gains unprecedented importance. In that context, this new translated text is an invitation to collaborate not just with Gil as translator but also anew with Césaire as anticolonial writer.

Césaire’s poetic brilliance and his ability to infuse political activism with artistic expression offer a model for how art can be a powerful vehicle for social change. In times of social unrest, his work inspires artists and activists to use creativity as a means of resistance and transformation. His advocacy for solidarity transcends cultural and national boundaries, emphasizing the importance of working together against oppression and inequality worldwide.

This message is vital in our interconnected world, in which global challenges like pandemics, economic inequalities, and human rights abuses demand cooperative solutions. Aimé Césaire’s ideas can still provide valuable insights and inspiration for addressing complex contemporary issues while honoring and preserving diverse cultural identities and fostering global justice. Through Gil’s translation, Césaire’s radical grammar of liberation finds renewed urgency. The play becomes an archive of struggle—a space where silence bears witness, and where poetry makes resistance audible. . . . . . . And the Dogs Were Silent is thus a vital contribution to anti-colonial aesthetics, diasporic memory, and revolutionary poetics.