Variations on Verrition: (Re)turning to the Enigmatic Final Word of Aime Cesaire's Cahier d'un retour au pays natal

Besides the neologism negritude, the term verrition, a hapax legomenon and the final word of Aime Cesaire's celebrated long poem Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (1939-56), is perhaps the most contested and ambiguous signifier in the poet's corpus. This essay reconsiders the much-debated question of verrition and its poiesis. Contra a long-standing tenet of Cesaire criticism-that verrition was a pure neologism-and further to Rene Henane (Glossaire des termes rares [2004]) and Carrie Noland (Voices of Negritude [2015]), I identify several textual antecedents to and possible sources of this supposed neologism that have implications for how we read the final stanza of the Cahier. Critical focus on Cesairean neology has had a somewhat obfuscatory effect on thinking through subtler dimensions of Cesaire's decolonial poetics, especially how the poet frequently reinvests and rearticulates existing terms in French, redirecting them toward antiracist and anticolonial ends.