It is through Poetry that One Copes with Solitude: An Interview with Aimé Césaire

ROWELL: In the United States we know you mainly as a poet and a playwright.

CÉSAIRE: The Americans know my better self.

ROWELL: When I mention your name here in Martinique, general readers not only speak of your creative writing; they also speak of you as a political figure and of how you have instilled in the minds of the people of Martinique the importance of education-that is, education for everyone, not for an elite. Would you in retrospect talk about your career in politics? In Notebook of a Return to My Native Land, for example, the central persona addresses his country this way:

If all I can do is speak at least I will speak for you.... My tongue shall serve those miseries which have no tongue, my voice the liberty of those who founder in the dungeons of despair.

Is that a kind of summary of your political career?

CÉSAIRE: The expression “political career” makes me shudder a little, even though you are perfectly entitled to use it. I feel a certain anxiety when reading myself again, and when I hear this, I am filled with a certain sadness. When I wrote those lines, I was twenty-five years old and I was still sitting on the benches of Normale Supérieure. This Notebook, in my mind is, in spite of its being short, the fundamental book. It is from this book that all the rest came. In all things there is a fundamental intuition. This intuition, this fundamental vision, is in the Notebook. People do not have a very keen sense of history; you must go back to the period of this Notebook. You must try to imagine what the life of an eighteen-year-old man of color, a young Negro isolated in Paris, was like. So I arrive in Paris. What do I know of the vast world? Not much. Two days after my arrival I meet, at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, a young man from Senegal who was a few years ahead of me in his career. He is Léopold Sedar Senghor. From the first day a strong bond of friendship unites us. He asks me, “Where are you from, bizuth?” I answer, “I come from Martinique.” “What’s your name?” I recite my last name, Christian names, and background. And he says, “My name is Léopold Sedar Senghor.” And he adds, “From now on you’ll be my freshman.” He introduces me to the school, and very quickly we become pals. We translate our Latin texts together; we build the world anew. He asks me about the West Indies. I literally drink from his lips whatever he can tell me about Africa. He brings me books, ethnography books. Together we discover Frobenius. We are filled with wonder; we read all this and comment upon it. He writes. I show him my poems … and this goes on for months. I have mentioned Frobenius, but there is something else which also influenced us very much (you must never be ungrateful toward your predecessors): for us they were the Black Americans. In spite of our imperfect knowledge of English, we had read people like Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, later Sterling Brown and other people of the Black Renaissance collected in Alain Locke’s anthology [The New Negro]. There was also Léon Damas, but he was already a little “emancipated,” slightly marginal, and this is not pejorative. They [the Black Americans] were the first to teach us the rudiments of what we called “Négritude.” They were the first to say “Black is beautiful.” This does not seem to be much, but it was tremendous. It was the beginning of a cultural revolution, a kind of revolution of values. It was in no way a refusal of the outside world, it was bringing things into focus. What for us became fundamental was-and that was new-a desperate quest for the Negro “Self.”

For Senghor there was no problem whatsoever, because, as a Senegalese-and in spite of...