from Aimé Césaire

It is important that we realize how clearly one breaks into two, how the contradictions in the Negritude movement and its different tendencies break it apart. Césaire reflects to one degree or another most of these tendencies, but he is in the main reflective, in Retours, of the revolutionary nationalist aspect of what is called the Negritude movement, rather than the negative or cultural nationalist aspect.

Oppressed by imperialism, colonialism, racism, Zionism, the oppressed nations and peoples fight back. To the extent that nationalism represents resistance to oppression it is revolutionary. Even where it focuses on culture, when it refuses to be wiped out by the imposition of colonial culture, when it raises up the history and lives of the oppressed people as part of the struggle for their future, it is revolutionary. That is revolutionary culture. When it sees that culture as some static, unchangeable, mystical phenomenon with certain eternal, metaphysical, nonmaterial, and nonmaterially derived values, it is reactionary; it is bourgeois nationalism; and finally it serves to raise a new bourgeoisie, the national bourgeoisie, to power. Senghor’s Senegal is proof in living color of the reactionary nature of such cultural nationalism. The “eternal mystical values” of black communalism, supposedly raised in a modern African socialism, are the excuse of the most shameless bootlicking of French imperialism, and for one of the most relentlessly class-stratified black societies in West Africa today.

For instance, Senghor’s definition of Negritude (which is niggerness or blackness), “the total of black Africa’s cultural values,” proposes that there is a static cultural essence to blacks apart from the development of the specific material base of the culture itself. But culture reflects first and foremost the material, i.e., the economic and with that the political, framework of its being. Africa’s cultural values when? During primitive communalism, slavery, feudalism, capitalism? During ancient Egypt? In Songhai, enslaved by colonialism, or up under the well-polished fingernails of black neocolonialism.

Césaire, on the other hand, defines Negritude in 1959 as “the awareness of being black, the simple acknowledgement of a fact which implies acceptance of it, a taking charge of one’s destiny as a black man, of one’s history and culture.” Here there is self-knowledge, self-affirmation, and the move to liberation. Blackness is not a static, mystical, “eternal” cultural quality; it is concrete consciousness and with that, concrete struggle. It is not enough to understand the world; we must change it…

The language of Retours is rich, deep, and rhythmical, full of ecstasy, pain, introspection, celebration, but it is connected by feeling and the power of its focus. The language rushes, and this is my basic sense of it, it rushes, it leaps, it is a whirlwind, it literally sweeps us in torrents…