This may be somewhat arcane, and unrelated to American politics and the general interest of this site, but I think this deserves attention.
Aimé Césaire, poet and former mayor of Fort-de-France and deputy to the French National Assembly from Martinique, has died at the age of 94.
This is only a quick post to announce the death of poet, politician and philosopher Aimé Césaire, in Fort-de-France, at the age of 94. Césaire was an intellectual giant in the Caribbean, the originator, along with Léopold Senghor and Léon Gontran Damas, of the black intellectual movement, négritude, one of the sources of American black power.
Césaire is most well known in the US for his long poem, "Notebook of a Return to the Native Land," an explosive and rich poem, filled with dynamic meters, coined words and powerful images, dissecting the vicissitudes of being Martinican, of being black and French simultaneously. André Breton, the Surrealist leader, who met Césaire, appropriately by chance in Fort-de-France (in the course of fleeing the Nazi conquest of France), declared him the greatest lyric poet of the 20th century. He is also known for his short polemic, "Discourse on Colonialism" (recently republished by Monthly Review press with a superb introduction by Prof. Robin D.G. Kelley), an angry, impassioned and analytic account of the cost of colonialism in the colonized countries.
Beloved in Martinique, he served as the mayor of Fort-de-France from 1945 until 2001, and was deputy to the French National Assembly for almost as long.
There is already talk of burying him in the Pantheon, the resting place of France's secular heroes (including Rousseau, Voltaire, Hugo, Malraux and others).
Alas, my copy of "Notebook" is not in front of me, so I can't supply a sample of his verse, but here is an obituary from the Times of London.
Poet, dramatist, statesman, former deputy for Martinique in the French National Assembly and mayor of its capital, Fort-de-France, Aimé Césaire was one of the earliest advocates of négritude — the awareness of the cultural and historical consequences of being African, or of African descent, in a then white-dominated world.
“Before Césaire, West Indian literature was a literature of Europeans,” wrote his fellow black Martinican, Frantz Fanon.
Césaire was the most famous son of his tiny island in the eastern Caribbean. His Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (Notebook of a Return to a Native Land) of which there are numerous translations into a number of languages, was certainly the most influential work ever written so far as francophone Africans and West Indians were concerned.
In 1934, with Léopold Senghor, later President of Senegal, and Léon Damas from French Guiana, he was a principal founder of the concept of négritude, which aimed to give again to black people a pride in their African roots. It was Césaire who coined the term in that year, in a student review, L’Etudiant noir, which he co-founded while at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. He felt that those of African descent had been denied their history, and that their cultural heritage had been assimilated by force into white cultures. Its unique genius, he asserted, should be recognised and nourished. This was black identity.
Aimé Fernand David Césaire was born in 1913 at Basse Pointe, in the shadow of the volcanic Mount Pelée on the northeast coast of the island of Martinique. His father was a taxation clerk, his mother a seamstress.
Martinique was the most assimilated of all French colonies. It was to become an overseas département (DOM) of France, and, indeed, Césaire was the rapporteur (member acting as a spokesman) in the Constituent Assembly which legislated for this new status in March 1946. (He had been elected to the Assembly in 1945, and then to the successor National Assembly in 1946, serving an unbroken tenure until 1993.)
This political assimilation was, Césaire saw — and Martinique still agrees with him — immensely advantageous economically to the inhabitants of the island. Cultural assimilation was an entirely different matter. He therefore rode two horses.
His parents were poor but literate. Indeed, Césaire exaggerated their poverty for effect in his greatest poem. He excelled at school on the island and on a scholarship continued his education in Paris, first at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, then the École Normale Supérieure (for teacher training) and finally the Sorbonne, where he studied the classics and French literature.
While in Paris, he wrote Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, but at that time it received little attention. It was written as an essay in self-discovery, to uncover his own essential négritude. He then returned to Martinique with his wife Suzanne Roussy (also from Martinique), both to begin teaching there at the Lycée Schoelcher in 1939.
The war brought a new political awareness to Martinique. The fall of France saw large warships and their crews which had been sent to its harbour for safety in effect interned there. Racial tensions grew between these crews, their families and the locals. The latter came together, overthrew the Vichy administration in the summer of 1943, and rallied to General de Gaulle. Césaire was prominent in this, and was elected mayor of Fort-de-France in 1945. (He remained mayor until 2001, the longest-serving ever.)
In Paris, as one of the two Communist deputies — out of the three the island sent in 1946 — he became famous through his poetry and other writing. Cahier was republished and acclaimed: Jean-Paul Sartre wrote:
“Surrealism, a European poetic movement, is stolen from the Europeans by a black who turns it against them,” while the father of surrealism, André Breton, praised Cahier in the highest terms.
Its reputation grew and grew — there are several translations in English alone — it is a lyrical and passionate affirmation of his native roots, though Césaire left out that, at home, his parents insisted that he spoke French, rather than the vernacular Creole. The work is powerful, poetic and in no way polemical.
Many have wondered if the fame of this poem has obscured the greater maturity of later works: Les armes miraculeuses (1946); Soleil cou coupé (1948), translated as Beheaded Sun in 1972, and Corps perdu (1950) translated as Disembodied (1973). These were vaguely surrealistic, repetitive, but rich in language. The themes were slavery, oppression, freedom, Sun and Earth, animals and trees — and the paradisiac landscape lying below the great volcano of Mount Pelée. Césaire compared his personality to the mountain: gentle but with white-hot lava underneath. The volcano had erupted in 1902, wiping out the capital then, St-Pierre, and all its thousands of inhabitants (save one).
Césaire became increasingly disillusioned by the governments of the Fourth Republic, and for a time ceased attending the National Assembly. But in 1958 came General de Gaulle and his referendum for the Fifth Republic. Césaire campaigned for a “yes”. Asked why, his reply was that because the people of Martinique had made a wager with the new regime.
Their “yes” was a conditional one. France was undertaking to improve their condition and to grant certain prerogatives at local level. Instinctively, too, Césaire knew, as did the leaders of francophone Africa, of de Gaulle’s empathy with black people. The bargain has been largely kept: Martinique has considerable powers of self-government.
Césaire had broken with communism in 1956 over the Soviet repression of revolt in Hungary. He formed his own party, the Parti Progressiste Martiniquais (PPM), very much his own vehicle and, like him, independent and socialist. Concluding that Moscow cared nothing for black freedom, he concentrated on liberating the Third World from Western imperialism by cultural means.
Now he spoke more at international forums than in the National Assembly, and focused on the drama for more direct effect. A powerful play, La tragédie du roi Christophe (1963), depicts Henry Christophe, black king of Haiti; Une tempête (1969) was a black version of Shakespeare, loathed by most European critics, but striking home with black audiences.
Césaire had a charismatic presence, yet with it was gentle and impeccably polite, a contrast with his powerful and violent writings. After he stepped down from the office he had held for more than half a century, he was made honorary mayor of Fort-de-France. His 90th birthday was celebrated with much pomp there in 2003, and he continued to receive a stream of distinguished writers from the francophone world until his death.
His wife, with whom he had six children, but from whom he had long been separated, died in 1968.
Aimé Césaire, poet and politician, was born on June 26, 1913. He died on April 17, 2008, aged 94
An intellectual, artistic and political giant is gone.