Aimé Césaire, Martinique Poet and Politician, Dies at 94

by THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

FORT-DE-FRANCE, Martinique (AP) —

Aimé Césaire, an anticolonialist poet and politician who was honored throughout the French-speaking world and who was an early proponent of black pride, died here on Thursday. He was 94.

A government spokeswoman, Marie Michèle Darsières, said he died at a hospital where he was being treated for heart problems and other ailments.

Mr. Césaire was one of the Caribbean’s most celebrated cultural figures. He was 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.

In Paris in the 1930s he helped found the journal Black Student, which gave birth to the idea of “negritude,” a call to blacks to cultivate pride in their heritage. His 1950 book “Discourse on Colonialism” was considered a classic of French political literature.

Mr. Césaire’s ideas were honored and his death mourned in Africa and France as well as the Caribbean. The office of President Nicolas Sarkozy of France said Mr. Sarkozy would attend Mr. Césaire’s funeral, scheduled for Sunday in Fort-de-France. Students at Lycée Scoelcher, a Martinique high school where Mr. Césaire once taught, honored him in a spontaneous ceremony Thursday.

Mr. Césaire’s best-known works included the essay “Negro I Am, Negro I Will Remain” and the poem “Notes From a Return to the Native Land.”

Born on June 26, 1913, in Basse-Pointe, Martinique, Mr. Césaire attended high school and college in France. In 1937 he married another student from Martinique, Suzanne Roussi, with whom he eventually had four sons and two daughters.

He returned to Martinique during World War II and was mayor of Fort-de-France from 1945 to 2001, except for a break from 1983 to 1984.

Mr. Césaire helped Martinique shed its colonial status in 1946 to become an overseas department of France.

He was affiliated with the French Communist Party early in his career but became disillusioned in the 1950s and founded the Martinique Progressive Party in 1958. He later allied with the Socialist Party in France’s National Assembly, where he served from 1946 to 1956 and from 1958 to 1993.

As the years passed, he remained firm in his views. In 2005 he refused to meet with Mr. Sarkozy, who was then minister of the interior, because of Mr. Sarkozy’s endorsement of a bill citing the “positive role” of colonialism.

“I remain faithful to my beliefs and remain inflexibly anticolonialist,” Mr. Césaire said at the time. The offending language was struck from the bill.

Despite the snub, Mr. Sarkozy last year successfully led a campaign to rename Martinique’s airport in honor of Mr. Césaire. Mr. Césaire eventually met with Mr. Sarkozy in March 2006 but endorsed his Socialist rival, Ségolène Royal, in the 2007 French elections.

Aimé Césaire: poetry as weapon

by Nira Wickramasinghe,

Open Democracy, 21 April 2008

http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/arts_cultures/literature/aime_cesaire_poetry_as_weapon

. . . Throughout his long life, Césaire contained the multiple identities of surrealist poet, political playwright, intellectual engagé, politician and anti-colonial crusader.

Aimé Césaire was born in 1913 in the small town of Basse Pointe in Martinique to a lower-middle-class family. He displayed early brilliance and was admitted at the age of 11 to the Lycee Schoelcher in Fort-de-France. After moving to Paris, and studying in the prestigious Lycee Louis Le Grand, he prepared for the competitive entrance exam of the elite École normale supérieure. During this period, many African and Caribbean intellectuals had been recruited under the French colonial policy of assimilation to study at metropolitan universities.

The years Aimé Césaire spent in Paris were formative in many ways. There he absorbed French culture, European humanities and learned Latin and Greek; but he also befriended the Senegalese intellectual Léopold Sédar Senghor (with whom he began to study African history and culture), and was exposed in Paris to influences from African-American movements such as the Harlem renaissance.

In this intellectually ebullient climate Césaire and Senghor (together with Césaire's childhood friend Léon-Gontran Damas) launched a journal called L'Etudiant Noir (The Black Student) featuring the works of writers from Africa and the Caribbean. The concept of "négritude"—defined as the "affirmation that one is black and proud of it"—was coined by them in the first issue of the journal, although credit is generally ascribed to Senghor alone. . . .

Critiques of négritude have pointed to the essentialism and nativism inherent in the idea that all people of negro descent shared certain inalienable essential characteristics. But négritude went beyond the race-based assertions of African dignity of WEB du Bois or Marcus Garvey, in that it attempted to extend perceptions of the negro as possessing a distinctive personality in all spheres of life, intellectual, emotional and physical. Within the négritude stream, Césaire's life and oeuvre was special and different in its attempt to embrace négritude, Marxism and surrealism all in one. . . .

Césaire's most renowned works, Les Armes Miraculeuses (Miraculous Weapons) and Soleil cou coupé (Beheaded sun), embraced both surrealism and négritude. But it was his Cahier d'un Retour au Pays Natal (1939) that brought him fame and led André Breton to describe it as the "the greatest lyrical monument of our time". This epic poem depicts in symbolic imagery the degradation of black people and describes the rediscovery of an African sense of self. It provided the all important starting-point for the claiming of a black Caribbean identity. . . .

His Discourse on Colonialism (1950), less known than the writings of his former student Frantz Fanon, argued subtly that colonialism affected the colonised as as much as the coloniser who was dehumanised through the practice of torture and violence. . . .

Aime Cesaire, A Tempest

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. (162)

selections from

Aimé Césaire: “Notebook of a Return to the Native Land” [1939, 1947]
translated and edited by Clayton Eshleman & Annette Smith
with an introduction by André Breton
Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2001, xxii + 68 pp.
Copyright © by Arthur Durkee, 2/7/02

[Question: identify negritude or surrealism?]

. . . then at evening an unimposing little church, which would benevolently make room for the laughter, the whispers, the secrets, the love talk, the gossip and the guttural cacophony of a plucky singer and also boisterous pals and shameless hussies and shacks up their guts in succulent goodies, and not stingy, and twenty people can crowd in, and the street is deserted, and the village turns into a bouquet of singing, and you are cozy in there, and you eat good, and you eat hearty and there are blood sausages, one kind only two fingers wide twined in coils, the other broad and stocky, the mild tasting of wild thyme, the note one spiced to an incandescence, and steaming coffee and sugared anise and milk punch, and the liquid sun of rums. . . .

. . . And not only do the mouths sing, but the hands, the feet, the buttocks, the genitals, and your entire being liquefies into sounds, voices, and rhythm.
At the peak of its ascent, joy bursts like a cloud. The songs don’t stop, but roll now anxious and heavy through the valleys of fear, the tunnels of anguish and the fires of hell. . . .

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 blazing flesh of the sky
my negritude riddles with holes
the dense affliction of its worthy patience.