[Marxism] Aime Cesaire, voice of French Black pride, dies

[Walter Lippmann <walterlx@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Aime Cesaire, voice of French Black pride, dies 
By Astrid Wendlandt
Thu Apr 17, 8:52 AM ET

PARIS (Reuters) - French Caribbean poet Aime Cesaire, founding father
of the "negritude" movement that celebrated black consciousness, died
in his native Martinique, the France's Ministry of Culture said on
Thursday.

Cesaire, 94, who was mayor of the island's main city Fort-de-France
for more than half a century, was admitted to hospital last week
suffering from heart and other problems.

His writings offered insight into how France imposed its culture on
its citizens of different origins in the early part of the 20th
Century.

The theme still resonates in French politics today, as the country
continues to struggle to integrate many of its residents of African
and North African origin.

In 2005, Cesaire refused to meet then French Interior Minister
Nicolas Sarkozy (now French president) over concerns that Sarkozy's
conservative UMP party had pushed for a law which proposed to
recognize the positive legacy of French colonial rule. The law was
eventually repealed.

Cesaire and African intellectual Leopold Senghor --later president of
Senegal -- founded "The Black Student" in 1934, a journal that
encouraged people to develop black identity.

ANTI-COLONIAL VOICE IN THE 1960s

The Caribbean writer rose to fame with his "Notebook of a Return to
the Native Land," written in the late 1930s, in which he says "my
negritude is neither tower nor cathedral, it plunges into the red
flesh of the soil."

His poems expressed the degradation of black people in the Caribbean
and describe the rediscovery of an African sense of self. In his
"Discourse on Colonialism," first published in 1950, Cesaire compared
the relationship between the colonizer and colonized with the Nazis
and their victims.

He was a mentor to fellow Martinican author Frantz Fanon, and their
anti-colonial writings were a major influence in the heady
intellectual climate of the 1960s and 1970s in France.

The negritude movement was a counterpart to the Black Pride movement
in the United States, though it has been criticized for not being
radical enough.

Cesaire was also a friend of the French surrealist poet Andre Breton
who had encouraged him to become a major voice of Surrealism.

Cesaire's anti-colonial rhetoric did not prevent him from having a
long-lasting political career.

After becoming mayor of Fort-de-France in 1945 at the age of 32, he
was elected deputy of parliament a year later, a post he held until
the early 1990s.

A graduate of the prestigious French Ecole Normale Superieure --
unusual for a black Martinican in the 1930s -- he remained a member
of the French communist party until the Soviet Hungarian repression
of 1956.

Cesaire was born in 1913 in the small town of Basse-Pointe in
Martinique. He married Suzanne Roussi in 1937, a gifted writer in her
own right, with whom he had six children.

(Reporting by Astrid Wendlandt; editing by Geert De Clercq and Paul
Casciato)


=========================================
     WALTER LIPPMANN
     Los Angeles, California
     Editor-in-Chief, CubaNews
     http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CubaNews/
     "Cuba - Un ParaÃso bajo el bloqueo"
=========================================

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