My love, “I will not come tonight”

By Jean Venel Casséus In the conception of my project « The Poetics of Jazz », this album where jazz and poetry make love, a question crossed my mind: how to divert the impulse towards carnal love to elevate it to the height of humanity? How, through a melody, to substitute intimate intoxication with collective fervor, the call of humanism? At that moment, a poem imposed itself on me with the obviousness of necessity: I will not come tonight by René Depestre. How can one speak of humanity without recalling this poem from his collection « Etincelles » (1945)? How can one ignore the voice of a poet who, faced with the sufferings of the world, chooses to abandon himself, to sacrifice the warmth of beloved arms to join the great wounded human community? This text is an offering. Depestre, as a poet who has weathered the storms of History, reminds us that private passion, however beautiful, loses its luster when the cry of the oppressed fills the night. This is not a denial of love, but a gesture of fidelity to something vaster than the intimate. The man of flesh becomes the man of the world. Desire transforms into responsibility. The erotic fades before the ethical. This refusal to surrender to an embrace is not an abandonment, but a commitment: that of responding to the call of others, of hearing the cry of the humiliated, of elevating love to the rank of universal brotherhood. In « The Poetics of Jazz », I did not merely sing the poem textually. I allowed myself to be carried away by the poet's breath, soul, and sensibility, more than by his words themselves. The text guided me towards a musical projection that seeks not to repeat but to extend. The piano traces the melancholic contours of refusal, the guitar establishes an acoustic gravity, blues inflections and soul resonance open the space to a vibrant fervor. The music embraces its silences, highlights its impulses, amplifies the gravity of its images. The poem remains present, not in the strict fidelity of its verses, but in the energy that flows through them and which I wanted to make audible. It is striking how René Depestre's journey makes this reading evident. Born in Haiti, exiled by dictatorship, a companion of revolutions and hopes, he traversed the century as a man standing tall. At one hundred years old, he embodies fidelity to a poetic voice that has never separated the voluptuousness of struggle, the eroticism of commitment, the vital impulse of human solidarity. His poetry is a dance, but a dance that knows how to transform into a march, a cry, a resistance in the face of the night. In I will not come tonight, the loving self fades before the collective self. The embrace is suspended to make way for the urgency of a wounded brotherhood. And yet, far from opposing the intimate and the political, Depestre connects them, for his refusal is also a way of saying that true love can only flourish in a world freed from its chains. To speak or sing Depestre today is to recall that art cannot be self-sufficient. That it is not about fleeing into beauty to ignore the ugliness of the world, but about making beauty a weapon and a consolation. Jazz, with its syncopations and silences, its impulses and its breaks, is for me the mirror of this tension between the intimate and the collective. It is a song that, through the refusal of a night of love, celebrates a vaster night: that of human struggles, that of shared sorrows, that of hopes awaiting the morning. I will not come tonight is not a text of deferred love. It is a reminder that poetry, like music, compels us to step outside ourselves. This poem calls us to sometimes renounce what is dearest to us, to respond to what is most necessary: fidelity to humanity. And my love, if « I will not come tonight », it is to return better tomorrow, laden with a vaster love, a more human love.

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Pennsylvania August 30, 2025. Illustration: Portrait of a woman (Saint Soleil) signed Levoy Exil. Not Tonight (The Poetics of Jazz): https://youtu.be/3CPV0kJwAas?si=jvfPMsRUsdWRa6FR