BOOKS
154
Excerpt from “Masques,” a poem written in French by
Nancy Cunard, fi rst published in Sublunary (1923). Reprinted
in Parallaxe et autres poèmes hors-la-loi et sublunaire,
Nouvelles éditions Place, Paris, 2016.
Negro Anthology, nouvelle édition en fac-similé
Edited by Nancy Cunard
Published in English by Nouvelles éditions Place, Paris, 2018
24.5 x 31 cm, 912 pages, extensively illustrated
ISBN: 9782376280392
Hardcover, 119 euros
www.nouvelleseditionsplace.com
FIGS. 14–18 (below, left
to right): Pages 817, 725,
307, 317, and 327 of the
Negro Anthology (1934,
Nancy Cunard, ed.),
facsimile edition published
by Nouvelles éditions Place,
FIGS. 19–27 (facing page,
left to right and top to
bottom): Pages 733, 419,
656, 683, back cover,
699, 718, 422, and 682
of the Negro Anthology
(1934, Nancy Cunard, ed.),
facsimile edition published
by Nouvelles éditions Place,
Paris, 2018.
contemplated as works of art but rather to be
used. African sculpture’s primary objective was
not to represent the visible world but to illustrate
invisible or incomprehensible ethical realities. African
art was a process of abstraction that did
not seek solely to awaken an aesthetic sensibility
but to arouse awe of the truths of the unknown.
Similarly, one must hold the Negro Anthology in
one’s hands and leaf through the book in order
to fully understand and experience what it has
to transmit.
Light of insomnia, palpitating, guarding,
And traveling ceaselessly over the masks hung on the wall
That stalk me gently from their corner of the heavens.
They told me—We are still waiting for you there,
Knowing that you will never belong to us.
Tonight, it rained on the rough voices and the songs—
The laughter left, one drop at a time,
Seeking asylum in the multicolored crowd;
The voices unfurled and broke like waves in a port
Where the waking gondolas lay.
I was an unknown boat, one among others,
Unnoticed, voiceless, and without light,
And awaiting neither breeze,
Nor daybreak, nor light.
There has never been an exact time at which
She took back her destiny.
The laughter departed, and I thought of nothing
Except for the eyes I see that no longer look at me.
The dawn of a lonely street kept me company,
And at my place, the masks are awake, placid, hung,
Crucifi ed, ecstatic as I aligned them,
And they smile and cry like in times gone by.
They see me the same way as they did when I discovered
the dawn
With their pale, tireless, and colorless eyes,
Uncomplaining and speechless, they are cheerful in the
emptiness.
civilization. More than a geography of cultures,
it puts together a tectonic system that propels humanism
to explode from authoritarian reason. It
is an organic collage that redefi nes modernity by
conjugating it in the plural. It derives a description
of universal civilization from all of that civilization’s
component elements.
The facsimile edition includes additional critical
essays. Three introductions retrace the genesis
of the Negro Anthology and put it into its historical
and intellectual contexts while also shedding
light on the pertinence of its form and content, all
of which are highly relevant today. An addendum
with biographies of the work’s 155 contributors
attests to the innovative nature of this “anthology.”
These highlight the importance of the political
and intellectual achievements of the African
diaspora in the 1930s and their connections with
the political and intellectual movements of the
European and American avant-gardes.
The reprinting of the Negro Anthology is a
logical extension of Frioux-Salgas’ curatorial
work. African masks were not designed to be
/www.nouvelleseditionsplace.com
