Damas Crosses the Line

Leon-Gontran Damas was the least known of the three founders of Negritude, the poetry movement created by French colonial subjects in Paris in the 1930s, but his poems gave the impetus to a politically engaged literary uprising among French-speaking Africans and West Indians. While his friends, Aimé Césaire and Léopold Sédar Senghor, went on to pursue high-visibility political careers and authored expansive and critically acclaimed oeuvres, the contributions of the quieter and more personally reflective Damas never found the same fame or public in his lifetime. His poetry exudes, however, the raw energy and urgency that lie at the core of Negritude’s declaration of Black identity.

Those poems and that search for self are the subject of an excellent short piece of theater: « Leon-Gontran Dams a franchi la ligne », directed by Frédérique Liebaut and interpreted by Mylène Wagram. Poupées noires, faux cols, banjos and Canadian Club… Damas’ evocation of the everyday with a surreal quality of imagery and brutally elegant language are dramatized over 90 powerful minutes through Wagram’s inspired performance, incarnating with equal sensitivity the poet’s disapproving mother or Damas’ own tortured figure in his Parisian exile.

The son of middle-class mulatto French Guineans, Damas struggled to render the foundational existential question for West Indians over the course of their 400 year history, spanning the extermination of indigenous peoples, the slave trade, race-obsessed creole society and the colonies’ relation to la Mère-patrie: what does it mean to be black in France ? The question has lost little of its pertinence nearly a century later, and Liebaut and Wagram find in Damas’ verse much to reflect on today, weaving a narrative through « Black Label », « Hoquet », « Limbe » and other works with a precise physical language and a handful of props and costumes. The intensity and intelligence of Wagram’s readings of Damas’ language and vision, even exploiting the rap tonalities and rhythms of these poems written long before Blacks had any kind of voice, make a gripping performance of these too long unheard poems.

To Feb. 27, Tues-Sat, 7 pm, Théâtre Lucernaire/Centre national d’art et d’essai, 53 rue Notre Dame des Champs, 6e, Mº Notre-Dame-des-Champs, 15-25 euros, tel: 01.42.22.26.50.