After a brief spate of fiction, my lit classes return to poetry this week. It’s not just any old poetry, oh no. If they thought Wordsworth and Shelley were inscrutable, I have no idea what my kids are going to make of Aimé Césaire. This is a man whose poetry is not only culturally and politically alien to them, but whose language is ridiculously dense. Reading his stuff in a gradual school French seminar taught me very important phrases like “the great delirium of his mentula” or “scrofulent bubo,” which — one never knows — I may have occasion to use one day if something incredibly disgusting goes wrong in a faraway francophone land.
I have already warned them that they will need to have a pencil and a very big dictionary in hand (or on screen, as the case may be) when reading (which they will be doing in the English translation). I’m sure, however, since this is something I spoke about in the last five minutes of class on a Thursday afternoon, that they did not listen, will not remember, and thus will not heed my warning. And then we will have our next installment in the saga of Vague’s Students Don’t Know What Words Mean and Therefore Say Dumb Things.
As for moving from understanding Césaire’s diction to performing any kind of deeper analysis, I have my worries. The whole concept of analysis and/or interpretation is not something the kids have exactly grasped yet. Every now and then they will launch into some thesis about how there are “a lot of threes” in the text, and couldn’t that possibly be “Christ symbolism,” but beyond that they are not what I would call hermeneutic detectives. This is going to be challenging. Do you think there is any chance of me getting them to take interest? Man oh man. Where’s a copy of Understanding Poetry by Dr. J. Evans Pritchard when you need one?
Maybe you should write ’scrofulent bubo’ in the comments to a particularly bad student essay. It would seem to be apt.
Yes, it’s too bad I can’t just work some kind of hex whereby a scrofulent bubo appears on the student’s face for each horrifying gaffe he/she commits in the essay.
If i DID write that, the kids would not even ask me what it meant — they never even read the comments I painstakingly (literally! the hand cramps!) write on the margins of their essays.
Nonetheless, I completely agree that it is an apt characterization!
if only your students were even close to old enough to get the dps ref. i got it, though, and it made me smile. i also work at a university and it’s amazing how often i want to shake my fist and say “kids. kids these days.”