Martinican poet, playwright, and politician, one of the most influential authors from the French-speaking Caribbean. Aimé Césaire formulated with Léopold Senghor and Léon Gontian Damas the concept and movement of négritude, defined as “affirmation that one is black and proud of it”. Césaire’s thoughts about restoring the cultural identity of black Africans were first fully expressed in Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (Return to My Native Land), a mixture of poetry and poetic prose. The work celebrated the ancestral homelands of Africa and the Caribbean. It was completed in 1939 but not published in full form until 1947.
my negritude is not a stone
nor a deafness flung against the clamor of the day
my negritude is not a white speck of dead water
on the dead eye of the earth
my negritude is neither tower nor cathedral
it plunges into the red flesh of the soil
it plunges into the blaxing flesh of the sky
my negritude riddles with holes
the dense affliction of its worthy patience.Aimé Césaire was born in Basse-Pointe, Martinique, in the French Caribbean. His father, Fernand Elphège, was educated as teacher, but later worked as a manager of a sugar estate. Eléonore, Césaire’s mother, was a seamstress. In CahierCésaire described his childhood in a harsh light: “And the bed of planks from which my race has risen, all my race from this bed of planks on its feet of kerosene cases, as if the old bed had elephantiasis, covered with a goat skin, and its dried banana leaves and its rags, the ghost of a mattress that is my grandmother’s bed (above the bed in a pot full of oil a candle-end whose flame looks like a fat turnip, and on the side of the pot, in letters of gold: MERCI).” Césaire’s family was poor, but his parents invested in the education of their children. To faciliate the studies of their talented son, they moved Basse Pointe to Fort-de-France, the capital. Amog Césaire’s classmate at the Lycee Schoelcher in Fort-de-France was Léon Damas, who later contributed to négritude.Césaire had excellent grades in school. At the age of 18 he went to Paris on a scholarship to continue his education. He attended the Lycée Louis-le Grand, the École Normale Supérieure, and ultimately the Sorbonne, where he studied Latin, Greek, and French literature. In 1935 he went to Yugoslavia with Peter Guberina,
During his years in Paris Césaire met other Caribbean, West African, and African American students, but the most important acquaintance was Léopold Senghor, a poet and later the first president of independent Senegal. Senghor’sAnthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache (1948) became an important landmark of modern black writing in French.
In 1937 Césaire married Suzanne Roussi; they had four sons and two daughters. Two years later Césaire moved with his family back to Martinique, where he started to work as a teacher at the Lycee Schoelcher. Among his students were Frantz Fanon and Édouard Glissant. In Haiti, where the Provisional French government sent him as a cultural ambassador, Césaire lectured on French poetry. His first play, La tragédie du roi Christophe (1963, The Tragedy of King Christophe), drew on one of Haiti’s earliest leaders, Henri Christophe.
During World War II Césaire was close with André Breton, who spent the war years in the United States and West Indies.Breton encouraged Césaire to use surrealism as a political weapon. These poems were collected in Les Armes miraculeuses (1946), Soliel cou coupe (1948, Beheaded Sun), and Corps perdu (1950, Disembodied / Lost Body). Cahier d’un retour au pays natal was described by Breton “the greatest lyrical monument of our time”.
Since the end of the war Césaire divided his time between Paris and Martinique. A member of the Communist Party, Césaire participated in political action and supported the decolonization of the French colonies of Africa. He co-founded with his wife Suzanne and other Martinican intellectuals the cultural journal Tropiques, in which he published his early poetry. In 1945 Césaire was elected mayor of Fort-de-France and he was one of the island’s deputies in the French National Assembly. Césaire resigned from the Communist Party in 1956 and depicted this decision in Lettre à Maurice Thorez (1956, Letter to Maurize Thorez). In 1958 he founded the Martinican Progressive Party.
Disappointed to government’s promises of socioeconomic improvements in Martinique, Césaire ceased to speak after 1950s in parliament and did not publish poetry for several years. However, he was active in international forums for the liberation of the Third World.
Between the years 1939 and 1955, Césaire mainly focused on poetry. His poems usually concerned with slavery, freedom, and paradise, language is distorted in opposution to the colonial French. “I am talking of millions of men who have been skillfully injected with fear, inferiority complexes, trepidation, servility, despair, abasement.” (from Discours sur le colonialisme, 1955) Césaire’s comrades in the French Communist Party attacked his linguistically difficult works for obscurity. In the 1950s he began to write more accessibly, but his international reputation was not established until towards the end of the fifties.
Césaire criticism of European civilization and colonial racism in Discours sur le colonialisme (1955) influenced deeplyFrantz Fanon‘s revolutionary manifesto Black Skin, White Masks (1967), an examination of psychic, cultural and social damages inflicted by colonialism. Césaire paralles the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized with the relationship between Nazis and their victims. “People are astounded, they are angry. They say: “How strange that is. But then it is only Nazism, it wont last.” And they wait, and they hope; and they hide the truth from themselves: It is savagery, the supreme savagery, it crowns, it epitomizes the day-to-day savageries; yes, it is Nazism, but before they became its victims, they were its accomplices; that Nazism they tolerated before they succumbed to it, they exonerated it, they closed their eyes to it, they legitimated it because until then it had been employed only against non-European peoples; that Nazism they encouraged, they were responsible for it, and it drips, it seeps, it wells fro every crack in western Christian civilization until it engulfs that civilization in a bloody sea.”
Et les chiens se taisaient (1956, And the Dogs Kept Quiet), a story about the blacks and their humiliation, marked Césaire’s transition from poetry to drama. La tragédie du roi Christophe, the first part of his trilogy, was about an early-19th-century Haitian ruler, Henri Christophe, who faced the task of building a state after independence. In Une saison au Congo (1966, A Season in the Congo), the second part of the trilogy, Césaire dealt with the tragedy of Patrice Lumumba and his assassination. In the play Lumumba is a poet-leader who inflames the African conscience, but fails to unify his own country. The trilogy was finished by Une Tempète (1968), a radical rewriting of Shakespeare’s play The Tempest. Césaire portrayed Prospero, the white man, as a decadent colonizer; Caliban, the man of instinct, has a black cultural heritage, he rebels for his freedom, but fails and accuses Prospero: “Prospero, you are the master of illusion. / Lying is your trademark.” Ariel, a mulatto slave, is pressed between these opposite forces of Caliban and Prospero. Une Tempètewas first published in the journal Présence africaine in 1968. Caliban’s first word is “Uhuru”, which is Swahili for “freedom”. “Call me X”, says Caliban in the 1969 text, echoing the radical voice of Malcolm X.
In 1993 Césaire retired from politics, but he remained a fervent anticolonialist, and in 2005 he refused to meet with Nicolas Sarkozy, the minister of the interior at that time. Césaire died on April 17, 2008, in Fort-de-France.
For further reading: Aimé Césaire by Gregson Davies, Abiola Irele (1997); Critical Perspectives on Aimé Césaire, ed. by Thomas Hale (1992); Aimé Césaire by Janis L. Pallister (1991); Modernism and Negritude: the Poetry and Poetics of Aimé Césaire by A. James Arnold (1981); Aimé Césaire by Susan Frutkin (1973); Aimé Césaire by L. Kesteloot (1962) – For further information: Césaire Bibliography – Aimé Césaire – Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism – Aimé Césaire
Selected works:
- Les Armes miraculeuses, 1946
- Et les chiens se taisaient, 1946
- Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, 1947 – Memorandum on my Martinique (trans. by Ivan Goll and Lionel Abel) / Return to My Native Land (trans. by Emil Snyder) / Notebook of a Return to the Native Land (trans. by Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith)
- Soliel cou coupe, 1948 – Beheaded Sun
- Corps perdu, 1950 – Disembodied / Lost Body
- Discours sur le colonialisme, 1955 – Discourse on Colonialism
- Cahier díun retour au pays natal, 1956
- Et les chiens se taisaient, 1956
- Lettre à Maurice Thorez, 1956 – Letter to Maurize Thorez
- Ferrements, 1960
- Cadastre, 1961 (rev. version of Soleil cou coupé and Corps perdu)
- Toussaint Louverture: La révolution française et le problème colonial, 1962
- La Tragedie du roi Christophe, 1963 – The Tragedy of King Christophe
- Une Saison au Congo, 1966 – A Season in Congo
- Une Tempete, 1968 (first version, based on Shakespeare’s The Tempest)
- Une Saison au Congo, 1973
- Une Tempète, 1974
- Euvres Completes, 1976 ( 3 vols.)
- Moi, laminaire, 1982
- Aimé Césaire: The Collected Poetry, 1983 (trans. by Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith)
- Non-vicious circle: twenty poems of Aime Cesaire, 1984
- Lost body / Corps perdu, 1986 (illustrations by Pablo Picasso)
- Lyric and dramatic poetry, 1946-82, 1990 (trans. by Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith)
- La Poesie, 1994
