May - June 2008


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Remembering Césaire

There is much to be said about this writer who has been lauded for his writings and who has received numerous awards for his works
by Elizabeth Hackshaw

On April 17th 2008, the Caribbean lost one of its greatest poets. Born in the town of Basse-Pointe in 1913, Aimé Césaire, Martinican poet, playwright, essayist and politician passed away at the age of 94 on the French Caribbean island of Martinique. Césaire’s voice shaped the politics and poetics of the Francophone region. Elected mayor of Fort-de France in 1945 Césaire did not retire from the political arena until 2001. During that period he helped draft the 1946 law making Martinique, Guadeloupe and French Guiana French Departments. Although the law afforded the former French colonies greater autonomy, the politicians who favored Independent status for the islands criticized Césaire for his role in Departmentalization. Césaire remained a vigorous critic of colonialism. In his polemical essay Discours sur le colonialisme, (Discourse on colonialism, 1950) he robustly attacked Europe and the Western world for their role in the colonizing project and its decivilizing effects on both colonizer and colonized.

In 1931 Césaire traveled to Paris on an educational scholarship. Paris in the 1930s was home to many black American writers and musicians from the Harlem Renaissance who had left a homeland plagued with racism and segregation. It was during this period, while attending University that Césaire met fellow French –speaking, black students Léon Damas from French Guiana and Léopold Sédar Senghor, of Senegal. In 1934 the three scholars started the literary review L’Étudiant Noir (The Black Student). In the review they voiced many of the concerns that would shape the Negritude movement. Their vision of Negritude focused on a desire to redefine the black experience through a rejection of Western ideology of black inferiority. Each of the founding members expressed his Negritude as it related to his personal history, but the movement would come to have a universal significance not only to those of African origin but to all oppressed peoples.

Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (Notebook of a return to a native land) written in 1939 articulated his Negritude; it is one of his greatest literary legacies. In the Cahier Césaire explored the Antillean condition in light of its colonial history. He exposed human and natural landscapes infected with physical and psychological maladies, drawing the Antilles in a manner that had not been done before. The Cahier was also revolutionary in its form; influenced by the French surrealist movement, Césaire employed poetic strategies that freed the poem from traditional constraints, liberating both form and content. The poem ends on a celebratory note emphasizing the notion of fraternity and the benediction of creation.

There is much to be said about this writer who has been lauded for his writings and who has received numerous awards for his works. St. Lucian poet, Derek Walcott called Césaire one of the greatest poets of the archipelago, French writer, André Breton considered the Cahier a masterpiece. There is reason to celebrate and remember this writer, and what gifts await those discovering Césaire for the first time.

On Thursday 8th May 2008, the French Section of UWI organized a seminar, which was open to the public, to honour this great writer. The UWI Main Library also held an exhibition from April 1st -May 2nd in memory of this poet and anti-colonial activist.