Homage to Aimé Césaire, 1913–2008

When Aimé Césaire died at the age of 94 in his native Martinique on April 17, the francophone world arguably lost the greatest contemporary poet of the French language. Césaire, the author of numerous volumes of poetry, as well as plays and essays, is perhaps best known as the coiner of the term négritude in his epic, groundbreaking poem Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (Return To The Native Land, 1939). He is also revered and beloved by his people, having been consistently reelected to serve as the mayor of Martinique’s capital, Fort-de-France, for 56 years, and as the Deputy from Martinique to the French Assembly for 48 years. Yet aspects of his dual career were also highly contested in his lifetime. His violent, hermetic, powerful French poetry, which he inflected to articulate a specifically Black Antillean subjectivity that denounced the crimes of slavery and the outrages of colonialism, was critiqued by the next generation of writers in the French West Indies—P. Chamoiseau, R. Confiant and J. Bernabé—for being too racially charged and too French at the expense of local Creole culture. Similarly, his urbanization projects as mayor were sometimes criticized for opting for modernity over tradition, and his cosponsoring of the 1946 law that made Martinique and Guadeloupe (along with French Guyana and Réunion) departments of France, with equal economic and legal rights as any other French departments, was harshly critiqued as pushing the island towards assimilation, rather than autonomy. Césaire himself realized soon after the vote in 1946 that départementalisation was a mistake, and it remained one of the regrets of his long career of political engagement.

Although Césaire is now highly respected by both the French literary establishment and the public sector, to the extent that it was even suggested that he be buried in the Panthéon in Paris among France’s great luminaries (a dubious honor given his stance on French colonialism, and one which his family declined), he is hardly a household name in France. In America, a country that he visited only once, being a persona non grata as a member of the Communist party from 1945–1956, his poetry is known to Anglophone audiences thanks in large part to the admirable translation work of Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith (The Collected Poetry; The Complete Lyric and Dramatic Poetry), which includes the Cahier. But it is perhaps his Discours sur le colonialisme (Discourse on Colonialism, 1950), a scathing indictment of the European West’s colonial ideology and policies, which has had the greatest impact on African-American readers of postcolonial texts.

Although this very brief introduction points to a career both complex and contradictory, I would like to argue for the profound integrity and coherence of Césaire’s poetic project and, by extension, his political commitment. It is to his invaluable poetic contribution then, that I shall devote the remainder of this homage. Césaire himself often said, “If you want to understand my politics, ready my poetry.”

Who, then, was Aimé Césaire? Born on June 16, 1913 in Basse-Pointe, Martinique, Césaire was the 4^th of 7 children of a modest family with ambitions for its children that included the valorization of the French (colonial) language as the language not only of freedom and upward mobility, but also as that of a great, universalist literary tradition. Even as a child, Césaire read Hugo and Voltaire, and became a passionate student of Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Mallarmé and Claudel. A brilliant student, Césaire won a scholarship to the Lycée Schoelcher in the capital, Fort-de-France, and his family moved so that he could pursue his secondary education there. Thus began an academic trajectory that was to bring Césaire to Paris in 1931 to prepare for the examinations to enter the prestigious Ecole Normale Supérieure.

It would be an understatement to say that studying in Paris in the 30’s changed Césaire’s life. It was there that, paradoxically, far from his native land, he began to become aware...