[Marxism] INDEPENDENT (UK): Aime Cesaire: Founding father of Negritude

["Walter Lippmann" <walterlx@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Nancy Morejon: One page for Aime Cesaire (Spanish)
http://www.granma.cubaweb.cu/2008/04/19/cultura/artic01.html
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Independent.co.uk

Aime Cesaire: Founding father of Negritude

Saturday, 19 April 2008

The most influential Francophone Caribbean writer of his generation,
Aimé Césaire was one of the founding fathers of Negritude, the black
consciousness movement that sought to assert pride in African
cultural values to counterbalance the inferior status accorded to
them in European colonial thinking.

He was born into a peasant family at Basse-Pointe in the northern
part of Martinique in 1913, close to the site of the town of St
Pierre, the former capital of Martinique, which had been completely
destroyed by a volcanic eruption seven years before his birth. He
grew up in a poverty-stricken environment in the wake of this
disaster and volcanic imagery pervades his poetry.

For his schooling, he went to Martinique's new capital of
Fort-de-France, where he mixed with the assimilated middle classes
and emerged as the complex product of a double socialisation.
Educated in the French public school system and steeped in the
classics of French poetry, he also identified with his island's
repressed African culture, sometimes likening himself to the figure
of the griot, the oral storyteller who serves as the repository of
West African communities' histories and traditions.

Césaire won a scholarship to study in Paris, arriving there in 1931
as an 18-year-old and living there at a time when intellectual
debates about African distinctiveness were gathering momentum. Along
with the French Guyanese Léon-Gontran Damas and the Senegalese
Léopold Sédar Senghor, he launched the magazine L'Etudiant noir ("The
Black Student") in 1934. The three young men drew inspiration from
the Harlem Renaissance's efforts to promote the richness of African
cultural identity and particularly opposed French assimilationist
policies.

During these years Césaire began to develop the ideas for his most
famous poem, Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (1939; translated as
Return to My Native Land, 1969), the work in which he coined the term
"négritude". The surrealist André Breton, who became a good friend of
Césaire's after a 1942 visit to Martinique and who helped to
introduce his work to Parisian literary circles, called the Cahier
"the greatest lyric monument of this time".

Drawing on surrealist techniques, the poem took its inspiration from
the Martinican landscape and Toussaint Louverture, the leader of the
first phase of the Haitian Revolution, whose biography Césaire would
later write (Toussaint Louverture: la révolution française et le
problème colonial, published 1960). It asserted a claim to
Afro-Caribbean ownership of the archipelago, "which is one of the two
sides of the incandescence through which the equator walks its
tightrope to Africa". The poem explores the distinctiveness of black
cultural identity in a historically grounded manner that prefigures
the black consciousness movements of the 1960s, the decade when it
became popular in the English-speaking world, thanks to a Penguin
translation. Stylistically varied, it moves between impassioned prose
outbursts against injustice and a more lyrical mode that celebrates
black ancestry.

In 1937 Césaire married another Martinican, Suzanne Roussy, with whom
he had six children. They moved back to Martinique, where Césaire
became a teacher at the Lycée Schoelcher in Fort-de-France, in 1939.
Along with Suzanne and René Ménil he edited the influential review
Tropiques, which further developed the ideas of Negritude from 1940
to 1943.

In 1947 he was a co-founder of another highly influential Paris-based
journal, Présence Africaine. His classic Discours sur le colonialisme
(1950; Discourse on Colonialism, 1972) came out of a speech in which
he indicted American imperialism along with older forms of
colonialism.

Césaire was elected mayor of Fort-de-France in 1945, a position he
was to hold with just one brief interruption until 2001, and he also
became a deputy in France's National Assembly, where he served from
1946 until 1956 and again from 1958 until 1993. He dominated
Martinican political life in the decades that followed his
appointment to these two positions and played a pivotal role in the
formation of the policy of départementalisation, which integrated
Martinique into metropolitan France as one of a number of newly
founded DOMs (départements d'outre mers / overseas departments).

DOM status was intended to end colonialism by giving France's
overseas colonies parity with departments in metropolitan France, but
with decision-making still centred in Paris, it was subsequently
considered highly controversial and many came to feel that it worked
to the detriment of Martinique. Césaire was affiliated with the
French Communist Party, but left this in 1956 after the Soviet
invasion of Hungary. He founded the Martinique Progressive Party in
1958 and later allied himself with the Socialist Party in France,
supporting Ségolène Royal in the 2007 French elections.

Césaire taught the Martinican psychologist and cultural theorist
Franz Fanon, whose more vehemently activist writings extended debates
about ways of combating colonialism in the 1960s. He was also a
significant influence on another younger contemporary, Edouard
Glissant, who moved away from Negritude towards the notion of
antillanité, which emphasised the Caribbeanness of Martinican
identity.

Increasingly, a later generation of black intellectuals came to feel
that Césaire's critique of colonialism was not radical enough and he
was also attacked for not writing in French Creole. At the same time
the ideas of Negritude came under fire for suggesting that all
persons of African descent shared common inherited characteristics.
However, unlike Senghor, who argued that African consciousness is
innately different from European, since it functions through an
intuitive form of thinking in which the analytical faculties are
subordinate to the emotional, Césaire saw Negritude as a historical
phenomenon that had evolved from commonalities in the post-colonial
history of African peoples, particularly the experience of the
Atlantic slave ships and plantation slavery.

Césaire's other volumes of poetry include Les Armes miraculeuses (
"Miraculous Weapons", 1946), Le Corps perdu (1950; Disembodied,
1973), a collection with illustrations by Picasso, and Ferrements
("Ironwork", 1960). An English edition of his Collected Poetry was
published in 1983. His plays include La Tragédie du roi Christophe
(1963; The Tragedy of King Christophe, 1970), another work concerned
with aspects of the Haitian Revolution, Une saison au Congo (1967; A
Season in the Congo, 1969), which deals with the death of Patrice
Lumumba, and Une Tempête (1969; A Tempest, 1985), an adaptation of
Shakespeare's play which followed the French psychoanalyst and author
Octave Mannoni and the Barbadian novelist George Lamming in using the
play's archetypes in a critique of colonialism.

On his death, the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, praised Césaire
as a "great poet" and a "great humanist", and he is to be honoured
with a state funeral on Sunday.

John Thieme

Aimé Fernand Césaire, poet, dramatist and politician: born
Basse-Pointe, Martinique 26 June 1913; teacher, Lycée Schoelcher,
Fort-de-France, Martinique, 1939-45; mayor of Fort-de-France,
1945-83, 1984-2001; deputy, French National Assembly, representing
Martinique 1946-83; married 1937 Suzanne Roussy (died 1968; four
sons, two daughters); died Fort-de-France, Martinique 17April 2008.


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