Aimé Césaire: The passing of the doyen of letters
By Linden Lewis, a Professor of Sociology at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania, USA.
On April 17, 2008 Martinique mourned the loss of its favourite son; the Caribbean lost one of its greatest poets, playwrights, essayists and politicians; and the world was left the poorer for the passing of Aimé Fernand Césaire. Césaire died at the Mesnard Hospital in the capital city of Fort-de-France, from heart complications and other ailments. At 94, he had enjoyed a long and distinguished life and career as a poet and politician. He was the Mayor of Fort-de-France from 1945-2001. Césaire had always merged the two identities – the poet/artist and the politician/activist – as part of his personal philosophy. He once observed, “politics wouldn’t be worth a scrap of energy if it were not justified by a cultural purpose.” He is best remembered for articulating a sense of pride and dignity among black people, whose humanity had been denied by European and colonial racism. His opposition to the racist characterizations of people of African descent was first seen in his co-founding of the literary journal, The Black Student, but it was the development of the philosophy of Negritude that propelled Césaire to international prominence, along with his colleagues Leon Damas of French Guyana and Léopold Sédar Senghor of Senegal.
Césaire is credited with first using the term Negritude, but the nucleus of the idea emerged out of the discourses and frustrations he shared with his comrades and colleagues Damas and Senghor, whose embrace of the received French identity was shattered by encounters with racism in Paris. Césaire described Negritude as “a resistance to the politics of assimilation.” It was part of a general struggle against alienation. Césaire had also associated Negritude with the rise of Haiti and the successful struggle of its people for independence. In his most famous epic poem, Notebook of a Return to My Native Land, he used the word ‘negritude’ in print for the first time, and expressed deep admiration for Toussaint L’Ouverture. The Haitian Revolution in many ways represented for him a clear example of the capacity for leadership by the sons and daughters of Africa. His pride of race at a time of sustained and systematic global racism is brilliantly captured in his essay, ‘Negro I am, Negro I will remain.’ There are some who would interpret Negritude in purely cultural terms, but Césaire was clear about the political underpinnings of this philosophy. He had always maintained that Negritude emerged out of a leftist philosophy. He argued that it could not possibly have come from the right. It is, however, precisely this sensitivity to the race question that placed him in conflict with members of the Communist Party in France.
