The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire (2024)

In this interview with Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich, Amy Herzog and the artist discuss her first feature film, The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire (2024), an experimental meditation on the life and legacy of Martinican author Suzanne Roussi Césaire. Hunt-Ehrlich navigates a seemingly irresolvable quandary in taking on Césaire as a subject: how to remember and animate the work of an artist who refused to preserve her own work. Césaire burned all of her writing beyond seven essays that appeared in the journal Tropiques (1941 – 45), which she coedited in the shadow of her husband, Aimé Césaire. Hunt-Ehrlich discusses her extensive and collaborative research process, her work with fragments as a black feminist practice, the politics of refusal, and authorship as an always unfinished, intergenerational project.