Homage to Aimé Césaire

In his book of interviews with Aimé Césaire, the filmmaker Patrice Louis designates him as "un nègre fondamental." It is a term that is entirely appropriate, calling attention as it does to the pre-eminent status of Aime Césaire as one of the founding figures of black expression in modern times. It sums up at once our perception of Césaire as the living embodiment of the historic passion of the black race, and the immense scope of the inspiration that has presided at the elaboration and evolution of all his work, both poetic and discursive. More specifically, it points us to the seismic impact and enduring significance of the great poem Cahier d'un retour au pays natal, which, in the nearly seventy years of its original composition, remains the master text of the resurgence of will and consciousness on the part of the black race in the twentieth century, a phenomenon that we now associate with Negritude, as concept and movement, of which the First Congress of Negro Writers and Artists was a high point—the very congress whose fiftieth anniversary we're celebrating today. And it is not without significance that we owe the word "negritude" itself to none other than Aimé Césaire.

One might expand upon the term by which Patrice Louis sought to capture the historic role of Aimé Césaire, by remarking on the way in which his life and career as a writer have been so closely bound up with the black experience that it has become quite impossible to dissociate the two. We hardly need to emphasize that this experience, in its full historical perspective, has been central to Césaire's expression. In a personal response that was nothing short of visceral, reaching to the very recesses of his being, Aimé Césaire lent the extraordinary energy of his poetry to voicing the existential predicament of the black race. It is important for us to recall at this time the searing nature of the situation to which, like other black writers, Césaire was responding, the grim reality of what Paul Gilroy has called "the racial terror" visited on the black race during the long history of degradation that has marked our modern experience. The primary import of Césaire's poetry thus derives from its forceful articulation of our historical grievance as black people.

Ma bouche sera la bouche des malheurs qui n'ont point de bouche, ma voix la liberté de celles qui s'affaissent au cachot du désespoir.

The gesture of identification and of self-dedication denoted by these lines underlies the portrait of a wounded consciousness projected by the principal character, Le Rebelle, in his play Et les chiens se taisaient:

Mon nom: offensé

Mon prénom: humilié

Mon état: révolté

Mon âge: l'âge de la pierre

This is the voice of Aimé Césaire, the Nietzschean man of Resentment, giving expression to his tragic apprehension of the black condition. This has determined the pathetic strain that runs through so much of his verse, as for example in the poem "Le griffon," with its poignant accents that reflect the acute disarticulation in the psyche that so many individuals of Césaire's generation felt as a factor of their immediate sense of self, and which Frantz Fanon has analyzed with such penetration in Peau noire, masques blancs. To remark upon the deep pathos that forms so much of the structure of feeling in Césaire's work is to call attention to a factor of the poetry that we tend to lose sight of at the present time, that is, the profound sentiment of alienation bred in black subjects of his time by the colonial context of their human experience. For as Césaire himself had occasion to remark sometime during the seventies, the psychological malaise from which this sentiment springs and which came to color his expression was no mere view of the mind ("une vue de l'esprit") but a pervasive factor of blacks' very existence.

Cesaire's poetry testifies to the intensity with which he...