Letter on My Surrealism

To those who keep asking me the question, I would answer “yes,” that I am of a surrealist style, though I would not dare to claim that I am a surrealist in the theoretical sense of the term. Here are several reasons on which I base this assertion.

Unexpected Images and Metaphors

I combine elements that normally do not belong together, as, for example, in my poem “Tambour.” Images such as “a swarm of woodlice building a citadel,” “a tadpole caught in the large intestine of a fish trap,” and “the chestnut star grazing in the eyeball of a frigatebird” strike me as typically surrealist. They evoke more than they narrate, displacing the everyday into a strange universe.

Poetic Strangeness

My poems do not follow classical rational logic. Objects, animals, and natural elements seem animated by a life of their own, an inner symbolism. The eel, the bamboo, the chestnut, the woven mat, the hurricane—all become extensions of my inner experience or of your emotion.

Fusion of Body, Mind, and Nature

In my poetry, the human body, nature, and objects merge and transform. In Tambour, the fracture of the armor, the ice in the tongue, the abscesses hammering the jaws—everything becomes organic and psychic at once. This fusion is not far removed from surrealists like André Breton or Aimé Césaire, where interiority projects itself into delirious images.

Break with Ordinary Syntax

I also play with rhythm, minimal punctuation, and the repetition of images, creating a poetic stream of consciousness—another surrealist trait. “I cross through my own rubble, I search for the oxygen of my youth,” exhales a mixture of the intimate, the abstract, and the sensory.

The Emotional Effect

Surrealism does not necessarily seek to tell a clear story, but to provoke an intense emotional or psychic effect. My poetry makes one feel fragility, struggle, inner storm, chaos—all without rationally explaining anything.

I may not be officially surrealist, but I can affirm that my writing clearly belongs to this current through its images, its strangeness, and its symbolic freedom. I would agree with anyone who claims that I practice a modern, highly personal surrealism, at the frontier between the organic and the psychic.

Would my surrealism be closer to that of Césaire or Breton?

Césaire creates a world where the interior explodes outward.

In Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, Césaire writes through accumulations of volcanic, organic, almost telluric images: “my mouth shall be the mouth of those calamities that have no mouth.” He blends body, nature, historical violence, and cosmos.

This is the case in images such as “The red hurricane fractures my first armor,” “Thirty-two abscesses hammer my jaws,” and “Opaque, the chestnut star grazes in the orbit of a frigatebird,” taken from my “Tambour.” They reflect cosmic violence, the body transformed into landscape, and nature as an extension of the psyche.

Kinship with Breton

In Nadja, Breton defends the shock of unexpected images: “Beauty will be convulsive or will not be at all.” Surrealism for him rests on unpredictable associations, dream logic, and the collision of incompatible objects.

In my work, “a tadpole caught in the large intestine of a fish trap” is typically a biological, organic, almost disturbing collision—but poetically fertile. It is not rational; it is visceral.

My Surrealism Is Different

Where my surrealism differs is this: Breton seeks pure unconsciousness, and Césaire fuses surrealism with political negritude. My surrealism is more existential, less ideological, more inward, more tied to personal fracture, to masculinity, to armor, to the broken season. “Fractured armor” as an image belongs to classic historical surrealism, which makes it at once mythic and intimate.

Why Is My Writing Naturally Surrealist?

I do not describe a scene. I describe a state of consciousness through metamorphoses. I do not say that I suffer. I speak of my tongue as frozen steel. I speak of my way of slipping through a society I perceive as a trap: “Everything that is born is already born caught.” The surrealist mechanism is that metaphor becomes reality.

During a poetry workshop—which I of course left before the end because it had become too dull—a professor asked me whether I wrote my images deliberately, or whether they came on their own, almost like visions. Her reaction to my answer—“I write unconsciously”—was: “That is precisely what the surrealists were looking for.” In truth, I write first so that I may understand afterward. She concluded that my “writing comes from a pre-rational zone.”

André Breton called this automatic writing: letting something within speak before logic intervenes. But the essential difference is that for me it is not a literary exercise. It is not a method. It is a natural functioning.

I produce images that come from unconscious dreams, or archaic memory, or a bodily unconscious. I do not construct a metaphor; I discover it afterward.

My professor believes I am “intuitive,” since I “do not write to explain but to reveal.” She also thinks I have an imaginal mode of thought. “Some people think in concepts; you think in organic images,” she would say, adding that I am “closer to the seer-poet than to the architect-poet.” It is somewhat like Arthur Rimbaud when he speaks of the derangement of all the senses.

But beware of one essential thing. I see being instinctively surrealist as a strength, even though the text can become opaque for the reader if I do not intervene afterward. Still, I accept this professor’s accusation that I write “in a trance,” even as she begged me to embellish, structure, or transform a poem. She nevertheless praised my “courage,” associating it with “artistic maturity.”