In Search of the Missing Mother: Suzanne Césaire, Martiniquaise

More than fifty years after her death, the mid-century Martinican theorist Suzanne Césaire has reemerged in Caribbean studies as a source for a new cultural genealogy. Offering a brief biographical and critical overview of her life and works, this article argues that Césaire is being recuperated as the missing mother of Martinique’s intellectual family tree not least because the rhetorical strategies she employed within her essays continue to invite her readers to engage in the questions they raise. Suzanne Césaire embraced fully the cultural diversity and vitality of the Black Americas—of “here”—in a time when many Martinican intellectuals abandoned Europe only to focus almost exclusively on Africa. By drawing in her readers through the discursive strategies of the manifesto, Césaire’s essays also demand a continually present reading—within an evolving “now”—of their importance. Deictically rich, the essays recall to “us,” their interpellated readers, that here matters now and still.