Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (first published in 1939, with two revised editions in 1947 and a final edition in 1956), variously translated as Notebook of a Return to My Native Land, Return to My Native Land, or Journal of a Homecoming, is a book-length poem by Martinican writer Aimé Césaire, considered his masterwork, that mixes poetry and prose to express his thoughts on the cultural identity of black Africans in a colonial setting.
After a rejection by a French publisher, Césaire submitted the manuscript of the poem to Georges Pelorson, director of the Parisian periodical Volontés, who published it in August 1939, just as Césaire was returning to Martinique to take up a post as a teacher.
[1][2] Césaire continued to revise the poem and published two expanded versions with more surrealist elements in 1947, first through Brentano's in New York and later Éditions Bordas in Paris, with an introductory essay by André Breton that had first appeared in 1943 in the New York-based review Hémisphêres under the title "Un grand poete noir".
[5] In this final edition, which has further additions and revisions, Césaire also deleted some material from the 1939 and 1947 editions, "leading the reader away from the spiritual sacrifice of the speaker and toward a sense of collective socialist action", as Arnold and Eshleman put it.
[6] Alex Gil argues for a holistic reading of the entire textual history of the poem through its religious, surrealist and Marxian phases, not just the final edition, noting that "the poem's central theme and approach remain unchanged" throughout the four editions.