I met with Marguerite (Margy) Adams and Joslyn Gardner, cofounders of Emory University’s Black Feminist Working Group, via Zoom to discuss Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich’s film The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire (2024). Adams is a postdoctoral teaching fellow whose research focuses on Black American and Afro-Caribbean modern and contemporary literature, attending specifically to the sonic and its manifestations across performance and visual culture. Gardner is a PhD candidate in French. Her dissertation, heavily influenced by the work of Suzanne Césaire, reads camouflage as a Black feminist articulation of revelation and concealment.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity, and was originally published in print for the Atlanta Art Fair 2026 broadsheet publication, taking place from October 1 to 4, 2026.
Bryn Evans: There’s this one haunting quote from the film: “She threw most of her writing away, so we are making a film about an artist who did not want to be remembered.” How do you interpret that? And does it color your approach to Suzanne Césaire’s surviving works, which are consolidated in such a neat way?
Marguerite (Margy) Adams: This is the issue at hand with Black feminist archival study. The film is so powerful because it’s a surrealist reimagining of Suzanne, Aimé Césaire, and André Breton’s reckoning with one another. It can only be told in a surrealist way, reminding me of a quote from William Wells Brown: “Slavery has never been represented; slavery never can be represented.”
The Black feminist archival ethic continuously grapples with that. What do we do with a figure who probably was contentious to herself in the moment that she was writing? And with, alongside, and against her husband, who was this prolific public figure.
Joslyn Gardner: When I heard that line, honestly, it struck me as strange. Is that the question? Was that her goal? To be remembered? Remembered by whom? I’m thinking of this beautiful poem that her daughter Ina Césaire wrote called “Suzanne Césaire, My Mother” (2009). She is cannibalizing Breton’s writing, critiquing him, because he writes about her mother in an exotic way. He reduces her to her beauty. Her daughter actually takes a line from Breton’s poem and turns it. In Ina’s poem, her mother is “belle comme la flamme de sa pensée,” (beautiful as the flame of her thought), rather than “belle comme une flamme du punch,” (beautiful as the flame of punch).
In the newest collection of Suzanne’s essays, there’s an intro by the Guadalupan writer Daniel Maximin. He talks about how writing for Suzanne is an all-consuming force, which brings back the imagery of flames in the film. I don’t know if it’s more a question of remembrance or if she got to the point where her thoughts were leading her somewhere beyond writing.
MA: It’s really interesting how the film deals with action over words. We get a lot of moments in the film where the pages are burning, or it’s raining, and they’re being destroyed. Yet, around those activities, the actors carry on, even speaking directly to us and looking into the lens in a kind of self-reflexive, meta moment that acknowledges the film’s constructedness. It’s what Suzanne did in her own writing—a move that calls attention to the camouflage of nature, of Martinique, of colonial reality, of poetry, of the surrealist movement in Paris. These things compound and give us what she calls, “a blindingly beautiful depiction.”
JG: Yes, when she’s talking about the weather, that perhaps it was too blindingly beautiful to see clearly therein.
MA: And it cannot be clearly discerned. It might not necessarily be that she herself did not want to be remembered. The broader, underlying question is about authority, as in authorship, authoritarianism, and narrative agency.
The film is holding a tension—maybe because she threw all this out, she was really contending with her labor as a writer, domestic worker, mother, scholar, pupil. But it still gives space to let these versions of herself exist simultaneously. It doesn’t set in stone any of these things for certain. It’s not speaking for her. It’s just illuminating these multifaceted aspects of her life.
JG: Part of her camouflage is using literary cannibalism. She’s taking a prior text while questioning textual authority. Is there even a primary text? Or is everything just coming from somewhere else, no origin? It’s what she does in her critique of Breton. She’s taking some lines from his text and turning them.
One of her famous lines is, “Martinican poetry will be cannibal, or it will not be.” That’s another example of cannibalism because it’s coming from Breton’s Nadja (1928) when he’s talking about convulsive beauty.
BE: The idea of literary cannibalism reminds me of the concept of intertextuality. Even though it’s not the opening quote, the question of whether she wanted to be remembered is where the film begins for me. It produces a sense of conflict and implicates the viewer to consider that we are watching a film surrounding a historical, literary, and political figure, who may have objected to its production. So, why are we still looking? And what are we looking for? Why are we searching for her?
Sonically, I’m also thinking about the ballad as a melancholic form. How is the anti-biopic film also a sort of dislocation? The character portraying Suzanne is playing a mother, but she’s also a mother herself. In her inability to fully capture the figure, she almost becomes more like her.
MA: Everything in this film is so meticulously staged, but it’s still showing what’s behind the scenes—the lighting, the spikes, the trucks. It’s really interesting that they include production moments, but it also makes us wonder—because of the surrealist format—was that staged also? Are there lights behind the lights? Are there people clipping before the clip begins? That spiral is really interesting.
You mentioned the sonic, Bryn. I was really drawn to how the characters walk the tightrope between character and person. Voiceovers by Suzanne and Aimé play before the actors are seen speaking on camera. Is this a documentary, which then troubles the biopic mode? The characters speak and read off of the page but then their eyes wander and eventually look to us.
The film stages an encounter between the audience and the characters and the historical material, pulling the viewer in to help make meaning of this conundrum. What do we do with these scraps? What do we do with these archival fragments and pieces when we don’t have an authoritative commentary on what we ought to do with them?
JG: The film is pointing to itself as a production. It’s not putting forward that this is her life, period, but this is what we have interpreted her life to be.
MA: Yeah, it’s a variation on a theme of Suzanne Césaire’s life that is not at all dictatorial.
Joslyn and I were texting last night. She was like, what is going on with the slow dance scene with André and Suzanne? We thought she did not fuck with him. They were positioned so that when they turned, it looked like they kissed. And Joslyn was saying, is that supposed to hint at an affair or something? I don’t know what’s going on. And I’m like, girl, I don’t know. What do you think is going on?
BE: I feel like there’s a romanticization of the archive, and that is the sticky part of remembrance. It ties into this camouflage piece because you don’t actually know if you’re seeing it or sensing a chemistry there. It shifts in a way, just as language shifts in translation. Camouflage is a form of translation, too. You know, time I saw that scene, I looked up, “Did they have an affair?” in Google. [Laughs]
JG: For real. I was like, is there something I didn’t read that talked about this?
BE: It was definitely giving she wanted Breton.
JG: But I think that’s what you’re saying: it’s part of the camouflage. In “André Breton, Poet,” it seems like she’s praising him, but if you read underneath, she is critiquing him. And her critique of Breton is around vision and him seeing or believing he sees. The scene where the three of them are blindfolded had me think of her essay, “Le grand camouflage” (1945), because at the end, there’s a point where everybody is blindfolded. Breton believes he sees, he believes he understands the islands, but he has an exoticizing gaze. That’s central to her articulation of camouflage: the tourist isn’t able to see. Beauty itself is a form of camouflage, and there’s a duality where camouflage also acts as a form of resistance. The islands are not allowing people to see through its beauty.
MA: The guy that plays Breton is just waltzing around. The audacity of this man just to be like, uh, uh, where am I going? And the blindfolds cover the men’s eyes and ears, but Suzanne is still—the blindfold does not cover her ears.
JG and BE: Mmmmmm.
MA: She’s listening. She’s listening to her surroundings and seems to ask, what can I do in the stillness? What kind of resistance or refusal comes about when I don’t move? Breton’s is such a tourist’s view, which is paradoxically unsighted.
JG: I wanted to talk about the beginning of the film with the burning and the drums. It features a song in Haitian Creole—not Martinican Creole—that’s singing to Èzili Dantò, a Vodou Iwa known to be the protector of children and women, especially queer women. She’s also regarded as one of the primary actors and divinities fueling the Haitian Revolution. The film offers no translation: you either know what the person is singing—which is asking for a chicken to sacrifice in order for the magic to work—or you don’t.
The film beginning with Èzili Dantò is interesting because Suzanne also talks about Ayiti in her writing, so I’m seeing Èzili Dantò as Suzanne Césaire. We have these mother-daughter relationships in the film, but we would be remiss to forget that Suzanne’s also this revolutionary figure who was writing under the Vichy regime and was struggling against censorship. And once they got censored, the letters she wrote [laughing] she was not begging them to continue to write. She actually said, you know, good on it.
MA: I was like tea, Suzanne. Joslyn, this is so cool because this is the ballad of Suzanne Césaire, and the song for Èzili Dantò being the only words that aren’t translated is itself an intentional camouflage. We cannot translate what the drums are saying, but we can feel the rhythm that they’re trying to provoke. How do we intuit and understand meaning apart from words? That is what makes surrealism really powerful because it surpasses what is on the page. It’s the “invisible ink” as Toni Morrison said.[1]
JG: I want to go back to the song real quick. One of the lyrics is “Se ou ki wè.” The Kreyòl is saying, “It’s you who sees.” Even within the song, it’s talking about seeing, but the person who sees is a deity. Seeing is so central to Suzanne Césaire’s idea of camouflage—you believe you see, but you really don’t.
BE: I want to echo the relationship between camouflage and censorship that you’re speaking to and identify censorship as something that almost enables the evolution of camouflage. With the tease of “you who sees,” there’s certain things that we will not be able to see, that may be the lights behind the lights. We’re told that we’re seeing something but there’s always a frame that exists outside of it. A direct quote in the film is “nature camouflages reality.” I’m thinking about nature in the broadest sense possible, so the physical environment, but also the nature of a production, the nature of this coming through film versus the page, the nature of biopic or biography.
MA: Towards the end, Suzanne talks about when her daughter was born. “I felt myself become a portal between worlds, one psyche with a chorus of ancestors gathered waiting to welcome her.” Then she says there’s a danger in losing yourself in that moment, that when she watched her daughter arrive, at the same time, she felt the fall of the pen.
Can you interpret the fall of the pen as in she is writing down this process of becoming a mother to a daughter, continuing to tell a story of motherhood? Or is it that the pen falls away when my daughter is here because I have a responsibility to this human? “In the space where worlds touch, you can lose yourself,” she says. “You can become stuck in that moment where the world tore open.”
There’s just something really fascinating about that, where there’s a danger and a threat that comes with a miracle, of not being able to represent something in text. I wonder if this relates to camouflage and censorship—how is writing about reproduction dangerous? Or how is thinking about generations and mothering a threat to the Vichy regime?
JG: When you said labor, it made me think of the woman who is helping with the child during the film. I was wondering if you had thoughts on her presence in the film.
MA: I do have thoughts. She doesn’t speak at all.
JG: [Zita] Hanrot’s character literally says something to her. But there’s no response.
MA: There is no response. She is moving her body according to domestic labor. It almost made me think about whether that was a filmic representation of a split personality. If they could both operate as Suzanne. It made me spiral and ask, what is this tension?
BE: I think it does have a filmic element because I see the nanny performing Hanrot’s role, in the same way that Hanrot is playing Suzanne. Both require someone to play the other in order for the film to happen. It’s like when you have a mirror facing another mirror, it echoes. Because who is taking care of the nanny’s children? It becomes this chorus of labor, this chain of labor.
JG: A chain of care.
BE: We hear the baby offscreen, and its cries become a drone. And there’s the cicadas and that becomes a drone, too. They’re all of these choruses that are happening, even in the undulation of the river that seems intentionally sped up so it vibrates in a way, giving it a sort of life.
MA: It adds to the surrealist conceit of the film because voices are disembodied. Sometimes during voiceovers, no one’s mouth is moving. As the film progresses the horse comes in and you’re like, what the hell is that horse? [Laughter] It also happens when the weather gets wilder. There’s a really interesting feedback loop of how we interpret what we’re hearing against what we’re seeing. Bryn, that is such a good metaphor of the mirror facing a mirror and then it going on forever. It’s really apt for what this movie does: camouflage holds a mirror up to colonial reality and it compounds on itself until no one can discern any clarity about what’s actually happening. Except Suzanne. [Laughter]
BE: And the mirror also collapses the sonic and visual, because how can or how do we hear the echo of an image? That’s the chorus in and of itself—different harmonies, different registers.
MA: “I’m not dreaming of a new myth. I want it to come.” The bluntness of her response to the editors of the magazine at the beginning when she was like, I’m not going to fight you on this. I’m not dreaming anymore. It’s going to happen. I’m looking for it actively. I’m seeking it. She is instilling in herself the capacity for it to be made through her writing, through all of her productive or reproductive labor. She is attempting to fulfill this dream rather than waiting for it to happen to her.
JG: This is the indictment of surrealism. It’s not just dreaming—what really is at stake with surrealism is life itself.
[1] Toni Morrison, “Invisible Ink: Reading the Writing and Writing the Reading,” in The Source of Self-Regard (Vintage, 2020), 347.
