This chapter aims to contribute to current studies on the concept of the global city through analysis of Aimé Césaire’s 1939 epic book-length poem Notebook of a Return to My Native Land (Cahier d’un Retour au Pays Natal). By drawing on scholarship that has fruitfully brought the conceptual insights of Fanonian ecocriticism to bear on urban political ecology, the chapter works to illustrate how Césaire’s poem makes use of a poetics of breath and breathing to contest the stranglehold of urban ordering in colonial Martinique. While my focus is the colonial Caribbean context, I argue that analysis of Césaire’s poem can shed light on how the conditions once associated with the colony have since become characteristic of contemporary core cities, heralding the end of triumphant discourses that have sought to present the global metropole as an ideal to which to aspire. Doing so, I suggest, not only brings into focus the historical preconditions that have given rise to the manifold violences that shape contemporary urban life, but also helps contextualise the recent reinvigoration of Fanonian theory in terms of its ability to cast a searchlight on the socioecological outcomes of historic infrastructural planning. While I argue that a Fanonian ecocritical interpretation of Césaire’s poem helps illuminate anew the conditions of possibility that have shaped the uneven experience of present-day urban life, I also trace how Césaire’s poem sets out to resist the chokehold of the colonial city, and thus emphasise the various ways in which infrastructural violence manifests in the poem yet also comes apart.