A Requiem for Her Silencing: Reflections on The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire


by Yume Murphy 



For nearly two decades leading up to her death, Suzanne Roussi Césaire is silent. The exact motivation(s) for her silence—that is, her erstwhile role as a prolific Afro-Surrealist writer, scholar, and educator—unclear. When the Martinican writer tragically dies of a brain tumor at the age of fifty, she leaves behind six children, seven visionary essays, and an entombed literary legacy. Despite their separation (which she initiated) three years prior to her death, her legacy becomes widely cemented as the enigmatic, once-wife of Aimé Césaire—Martinican poet, politician, and co-founder of the Négritude movement. Most of Suzanne's texts have become lost to time if not destroyed by herself. The seven essays that do survive—all published between the years 1941 and 1945 in  Tropiques,  a literary journal jointly founded by Suzanne and Aimé dedicated to reclaiming Martinican ways of being—remain largely underwritten in the story of the Négritude movement, and unmentioned by her ex-husband. Eventually, the tide shores her back up to us through  The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire,  Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich's 2024 debut feature film on the elusive life of the Martinican thinker.

The film presents a speculative elegy inspired by a fervent moment in Suzanne's life. We learn from the opening title card that this period is defined by an isolated chapter when she was in blockaded Martinique with her husband during the Vichy regime of World War II whilst publishing  Tropiques.  Weaving between abstract reenactments, dramatized readings of her letters and essays, transcribed interviews with her children, and the cast's own scripted reflections on Suzanne's mystique, the film sets out to serve as a tribute, biopic, documentary, and love letter all at once. The result is a film that yearns for a figure rendered entirely out of focus.

"We are making a film about an artist who didn't want to be remembered," Zita Hanrot, who plays Suzanne, states directly to the camera before lighting a cigarette and peeling toward the saccharine sunset, shattering the imposed fourth wall as she will do again and again. Yet, this claim is rendered ambivalent; as interest in Suzanne's legacy experiences a renaissance, we are left to speculate on what exactly she would have wanted for herself today. While it is true that Suzanne's destruction of her writing can be interpreted as her opting out of a public narrativization of her own life, the film (in addition to her essays and advocacy for  Tropiques ) is evidence of the very legacy Suzanne established in her lifetime. As Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot invokes in his writing, the erasure of Black histories has necessitated the need for a Black imaginary that can conjure representations of Black life thought to be  unthinkable. 1 Accordingly, the film eschews a linear narrative in favor of a more suggestive approach reminiscent of her poetic, covert prose—largely drawing on her last published essay "Le Grand Camouflage," its title a reference to how the Caribbean's paradisal beauty is capable of masking the exploitative reality of life in the region. Hazy yet lurid, Suzanne's haunting obscurity becomes essentially the primary driving force behind Hunt-Ehrlich's film.

Image courtesy of Cinema Guild.

 Image courtesy of Cinema Guild. 
Filmed in a tree archive at the Montgomery Palmetum & Palm Collection of the Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden in Miami, the film's abundant display of southern Florida's vegetation evokes the forests of Martinique, just as Zita's presence conjures an uncanny resemblance to the late Suzanne. The French actress doubly performs as a surrogate for Suzanne's spirit while also playing the semi-scripted role of a new mother and actress preparing to play Suzanne. Similarly, Motell Foster plays an American actor performing the role of Suzanne's husband, Aimé. Josué Gutierrez acts as André Breton, the famed French Surrealist collaborator who, also barred from the Hexagon during the Vichy years, met the couple in Martinique. For the duration of the film, the duo and/or trio is backgrounded by the chirping sounds of the forest and anonymized figures, all practically gliding in and out of the 16mm frame. The strictures between who is cast, crew, or character blur with a tedious attention to symbolic composition and blocking. This simulation proves a visually poetic vehicle for a kind of allegorical summoning that melds the past, present, and imagined. While this abstraction takes inspiration from the form Suzanne was dedicated to, it does not give her a voice.

When I discover that the film is also based, in part, upon an essay by American writer Terese Svoboda entitled  "Surrealist Refugees in the Tropics,"  I'm surprised by what I find. Svoboda describes a revisionist, feminist history of the French Surrealists in the late 1930s and 1940s, who were enchanted by the potency of the converging Afro-Surrealist and Négritude movements. Parsing through epistolary exchanges, essays, and poems, Svoboda closely circles the worlds of Suzanne and Jacqueline Lamba, each the talented wives of men who aspired to wield "surrealism as a weapon" for the "liberation of man" in the face of fascism.2 The result is a revealing account of women whose respective contributions to Surrealism and Négritude were conveniently forgotten, if not erased, by their husbands. On Suzanne's missing play "The Dawn of Freedom," she writes:

 Why isn't her [Suzanne's] play published? Aimé has such a strong publishing presence, both on the islands and abroad. "In a very small voice, the great man told me that at the time, it was very difficult, for a woman, to be published," says an interviewer of his. Aimé doesn't have any memory of "The Dawn of Freedom" itself, and how it differed from the original novel [...] Close to death in 2005, Aimé gives a talk on the origins of Négritude, and he does not mention the Nardal sisters [Paulette and Jane, whose salons in Paris were instrumental to the seeding of the ideology that we now name Négritude] at all […] or his wife." 


Svoboda leaves us with a crucial question: Have these women been forgotten because such accomplishment, such acknowledgement, was not afforded to women of their time? The film ultimately deflects from this question.

Without a distinctly legible narrative or biographical context provided in the film itself, the seventy-five-minute film relies heavily on the spectator's pre-existing knowledge of Suzanne. The trouble with this approach is that little exposition is given to Suzanne's inner world. In Svoboda's essay, Suzanne's daughter recalls her mother saying "your generation will be the women who choose." We don't see how she chooses; how she chooses to sing even if piercingly out of tune, to let her hair down for the amusement of her children, or how she chose to wear red on her wedding day to underscore the secular nature of her union with Aimé.

Image courtesy of Cinema Guild.

 Image courtesy of Cinema Guild. 
Further, Suzanne's role as a mother is represented minimally. In the same two-minute sequence where Zita claims Suzanne did not want to be remembered, she describes how motherhood challenged Suzanne's role as a writer. "The work of writing was paramount to her [Suzanne]… It is difficult to be a productive writer when you have six children," she says, as her own newborn can be heard crying, before a nanny appears with the baby towed in a cradle. Zita's onscreen presence with her child offers a sort of bourgeois reenactment of motherhood, in stark contrast to both her remarks and Svoboda's narrativization of the difficulty motherhood posed to Suzanne.3

Zita, who we had just seen as Suzanne, now seamlessly presides as herself. The sort of roving gaze that traverses between time and place becomes indicative of the limits of Hunt-Ehrlich's dream-logic. As the buzzing coo of the forest remains through sequences, it becomes rather difficult to discern whether we are in Vichy-ruled Martinique or the Miami tree archive and shooting location. The camera's eye is haunted by the past, as the actress is haunted by Suzanne's words. It becomes almost impossible to distinguish Zita-as-Zita from Zita-as-Suzanne. However, there is little meaning offered to their juxtaposition outside of the frame of the film within a documentary format, to their resemblance and shared Caribbean heritage.

Even less insight is given to Suzanne's identification with Blackness as a woman in the context of Martinique's creolized society. Despite  créolité,  hybridity, and Caribbean identity being recurrent themes in the essayist's writing, the film wrestles with a depiction of Suzanne that primarily mediates her through two key male figures, André Breton and Aimé Césaire, and her modern-day corollary, Zita Hanrot. Halfway through the film, the trio of Suzanne, Aimé, and André reenact a sort of ménage à trois dynamique where we see Suzanne caught up in an amorous entanglement between these two male intellectual giants. In a sequence opposite André alone, Suzanne engages in a flirtatious dance with the famed French figure. This cinematic direction calls to mind the  tragic mulatta,  a racialized cinematic trope where a mixed-race Black woman becomes burdened by her inability to conform and/or gain acceptance into either white or Black worlds. Most often, the tragic mulatta's desire to pass is mediated through her relationships with white men. However, this direction is historically misleading. In no way do historical accounts of Suzanne describe her relationship with André as amorous—quite the opposite actually. It's important to note that Svoboda actually writes of how Suzanne is treated as an artifact, objectified by André:

 After their walk in the forest, André writes of Suzanne's beauty: "more dazzling than in a face of white ash and ambers." The beautiful found object. She could have been another mask André picked up at the market. 

It's curious how the truths Svoboda announces in her essay remain quiet in the film. By the film's close, we are no closer to knowing the contours of the figure whom the film serves as altar to. Suzanne, the fierce Surrealist essayist. Suzanne, the "black panther" whose dazzling beauty serves as camouflage for her renegade ambitions. Suzanne, the devoted mother of six who teaches tirelessly, often falling ill. Suzanne, the feminist whose womanhood relegates her to the margins of her ex-husband's life. Rather than reveling in the virtuosity of Suzanne's great camouflage, we are seemingly deceived by her.

Image courtesy of Cinema Guild. 

 Image courtesy of Cinema Guild. 
Buckling under the weight of the great silencing of its moored protagonist,  The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire  struggles with redressing Suzanne's erasure from history—opting for a level of narrative ambivalence that prioritizes the visual plentitude of abstraction. I find myself with a desire to witness some kind of unsilencing, for Hunt-Ehrlich to envision the unthinkable, in order to generate some kind of discursive life out of the living record. Perhaps that this narrative desire is not met is  the  point. Perhaps, a closer reading might lead you to consider how the film's delightful ambivalence toward Suzanne's legacy expresses one of many masks Suzanne might've worn throughout her life, if not Hunt-Ehrlich's profound fascination with her.4

For one reason or another, this sort of critical fabulation around Suzanne Roussi Césaire's silencing remains a mystery.5 Instead, the end of the film-within-a-film concludes with a question:  What?  Like waking up from a dream you can't quite hold onto,  The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire  escapes me. Fading out like a distant memory.
  1.  In Trouillot's declarative text  Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History  (1995), he explores how the Haitian Revolution was thought to be "unthinkable" because it challenged the belief that enslaved people could achieve self-determination. This Western denial of this event is an example of how power shapes history.↩
    2.  
  2.  John Gaffar LaGuerre, "Review: Marxism at the Cross-Roads: The Political Thought of Césaire and Fanon,"  Caribbean Studies  15, no. 1 (1975): 84¯93,  http://www.jstor.org/stable/25612676. ↩
    3.  
  3.  In her essay, Svoboda describes how "although often ill, she [Suzanne] teaches and cares for their six children while he [Aimé] shuttles between Paris and Martinique." Terese Svoboda, "Surrealist Refugee in the Tropics,"  Guernica  (2017),  https://www.guernicamag.com/surrealist-refugees-tropics/. ↩
    4.  
  4.  Frantz Fanon,  Black Skin, White Masks. ↩
    5.  
  5.  In her essay, Hartman discusses "critical fabulation," the use of speculative storytelling as a means of amending historical omissions as it relates to slavery and the legacy of colonialism. Saidiya Hartman, "Venus in Two Acts,"  Small Axe  12, no. 2 (2008): 1-14,  https://muse.jhu.edu/article/241115. ↩
    6.  

Yume Murphy by Stephanie Ayala.

 Photo by Stephanie Ayala. 
 Yume Murphy is a writer, editor, and strategist based in Brooklyn, NY.



Olukemi Lijadu