The Passing of another Collosus in the Black Literature and Negritude - Aime Cesaire
Author: Arthur Edgar E. Smith
Category: Arts and Entertainment
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An anticolonialist poet and politician who was honored throughout the French-speaking world and who was an early proponent of negritude, black pride, along with Senghor, Damas and U'Tamsi died here on Thursday April 17, 2008. A government spokeswoman, said he died at a hospital where he was being treated for heart problems and other ailments From April 9, 2008, he had serious heart troubles and was admitted at Pierre Zobda Quitman hospital in Fort-de-France until his death. He was 94.
Mr. Cesaire was one of the Caribbean's most celebrated cultural figures especially revered in his native Martinique, which sent him to the French
parliament for nearly half a century and where he was repeatedly elected mayor
of Fort-de-France, the capital city. Martinique's airport at Le Lamentin was renamed Martinique Aimé Césaire International Airport on January 15, 2007
Mr. Cesaire's ideas were honored and his death mourned in Africa and France
as well as the Caribbean. Césaire was given a state funeral held at the State de Dillon in Fort-de-France on April 20. President Nicolas Sarkozy was present but did not make a speech. Pierre Aliker, who served for many years as deputy mayor under Césaire, gave the funeral oration.
Aimé Césaire was born in Basse-Pointe, Martinique, in the French Caribbean in 1913. 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 Cahier Césaire 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)."
Though his family was poor, Cesaire'sparents invested in the education of their children. To faciliate the studies of their talented son, they moved him from Basse Pointe to Fort-de-France, the capital where among his classmates at the Lycee Schoelcher in Fort-de-France was Léon Damas, who later contributed to establishment of the literary movement négritude.
Having secured excellent grades in school, Cesaire left for Paris in 1931 at the age of 18 with a scholarship to attend the Lycée Louis-le- Grand.. During his time there, he helped found a student publication, Etudiant Noir. In 1935 he passed an entrance exam for the École normale supérieure, and ultimately he entered 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's Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache (1948) became an important landmark of modern black writing in French.
He created, with Léopold Sédar Senghor and Léon Damas, the literary review L'Étudiant Noir The Black Student which was a forerunner of the Négritude movement. In 1936, Césaire began work on his famous book-length poem Cahier d'un retour au pays natal - Notebook of a Return to My Native Land - (1939),which in essence is a vivid and powerful depiction of the ambiguities of Caribbean life and culture in the New World and this upon returning home to Martinique which was not published until 1939
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.
He married fellow Martinican student Suzanne Roussi in 1937, and the couple moved back to Martinique with their son in 1939. Both Aime and Suzanne got jobs at the Lycee Schoelcher. Césaire became a teacher at the Lycée Schoelcher in Fort-de-France, where he taught Frantz Fanon and served as an inspiration for, but did not teach, Édouard Glissant. He would become a heavy influence for Fanon as both a mentor and a contemporary throughout Fanon's short life.
During the 1940s, Cesaire was busy writing and publishing many collections of his work. He seemed to be influenced by art because he wrote a tribute to a painter named Wilfredo Lam and one of his collections has illustrations by Pablo Picasso.
The years of World War II were ones of great intellectual activity for the Césaires. In 1941, Aimé Césaire and Suzanne Roussi founded the literary review Tropiques, with the help of other Martinican intellectuals like René Ménil and Aristide Maugée, in order to challenge the cultural status quo and alienation that then characterized Martinican identity. Many run-ins with censorship did not deter Césaire from being an outspoken defendant of Martinican identity. He also became close to French surrealist poet André Breton, who spent time in Martinique during the second world war. 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). Breton contributed a laudatory introduction to the 1947 edition of Cahier d'un retour au pays natal, saying that "this poem is nothing less than the greatest lyrical monument of our times." ("ce poème [n'est] rien moins que le plus grand monument lyrique de ce temps")
In 1945 Cesaire with the support of the French Communist Party began his political career when he was elected mayor of Fort-de-France and deputy in the Constituent Assembly the French National Assembly for Martinique on the French Communist Party ticket. He was one of the principal drafters of the 1946 law on departmentalizing former colonies, a role for which independentist politicians have often criticized him.
Like many leftist intellectuals in France, Césaire looked in the 1930s and 1940s toward the Soviet Union as a source of human progress, virtue, and human rights, but later grew disillusioned with Communism. In 1956, after the invasion of Hungary by the Soviet Union, Aimé Césaire announced his resignation from the French Communist Party in a text entitled Lettre à Maurice Thorez. In 1958 he founded the Parti Progressiste Martiniquais.
In 1960, he published Toussaint Louverture, based upon the life of the Haitian revolutionary. He served as President of the Regional Council of Martinique from 1983 to 1988 and retired from politics in 2001.
During these years Cesaire attended two conferences for "Negro Writers and Artists" in Paris. In 1968 he published the first version of Une Tempete, "a radical adaptation of Shakespeare's play The Tempest" . He continued on with his writings of poetry and plays. All of Cesaire's writings are in French with a limited number having English translations.
Cesaire's poetry is in a style that is a cross between "artistic 'modernism' and black consciousness" with touches of surrealism. Cesaire is closely related to the word "negritude," which signifies the black youth's attempt to maintain a positive racial identity Many of his works thus combine the two ideas of negritude and surrealism. Surrealism is "a modern movement in art and literature in which an attempt is made to portray or interpret the workings of the unconscious mind as manifested in dreams; it is characterized by an irrational, fantastic, arrangement of materials" (Webster's 1348). Cesaire's poems are usually unrhyming and the style can be challenging. Cesaire's poetry also contains many metaphors which can confuse his readers.
Cesaire began to focus on drama with the poem "Chiens." which had so much dialogues in it that Cesaire transformed it into a play. In 1968 he published, Une Tempete, a version of Shakespeare's famous play The Tempest which he wanted to reflect black America though the setting is the Caribbean. "The central paradigm of the colonizer / colonized relation, as it is constructed in The Tempest, embraces the totality of the black experience in the New World". Cesaire's version of The Tempest could also be a reference to relationship between the colonizer and the colonized and the struggle for absolute power. In the play, Prospero is the master of the two men Caliban and Ariel. Prospero being the colonizer,both Caliban and Ariel attempt to gain their freedom from him. Caliban's approach to freedom is through rebellion while Ariel tries "to appeal to his [Prospero's] moral conscience". In the end, Caliban's rebellion fails when all he wanted was to be his own master. In his final speech, Caliban charges Prospero with lying to him and holding him inferior, a classic example of the colonized rejecting the colonizer:.
Prospero, you are the master of illusion.
Lying is your trademark.
And you have lied so much to me
(lied about the world, lied about me)
that you have ended by imposing on me
an image of myself.
underdeveloped, you brand me, inferior,
That ís the way you have forced me to see myself
I detest that image! What's more, it's a lie!
But now I know you, you old cancer,
and I know myself as well.
This final scene in The Tempest shows Cesaire's attitude towards colonization. The colonizer imposes on the colonized all kinds of lies. The colonizer makes the colonized feel unworthy of living.
In 2006, Cesaire refused to meet President Sarkozy then the leader of the Union for a Popular Movement (UMP), Nicolas Sarkozy then a probable contender for the 2007 presidential election, because the UMP had voted for the February 23, 2005 law asking teachers and textbooks to "acknowledge and recognize in particular the positive role of the French presence abroad, especially in North Africa", a law considered by many as a eulogy to colonialism and French actions during the Algerian War. President Jacques Chirac finally had the controversial law repealed.
His writings reflect his passion for civic and social engagement as evident in Discours sur le colonialisme (Discourse on Colonialism) (1953), a denunciation of European colonial racism published in the French review Présence Africaine.
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Keywords: aime cesaire, last father of negritude gone, senghor, damas, sakhozy, frane, martinique
View Count: 298
Date Submitted: 4/28/2008
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