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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: Black Lives
- Sprache: Englisch
Aimé Césaire is arguably the greatest Caribbean literary writer in history. Best known for his incendiary epic poem Notebook of a Return to My Native Land, Césaire reinvented black culture by conceiving 'négritude' as a dynamic and continuous process of self-creation.
In this essential new account of his life and work, Jane Hiddleston introduces readers to Césaire's unique poetic voice and to his role as a figurehead for intellectuals pursuing freedom and equality for black people. Césaire was deeply immersed in the political life of his native Martinique for over fifty years: as Mayor of Fort-de-France and Deputy at the French National Assembly, he called for the liberation of oppressed people at home and abroad, while celebrating black creativity and self-invention to resist a history of racism.
Césaire's extraordinary life reminds us that the much-needed revolt against oppression and subjugation can—and should—come from within the establishment, as well as without.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025
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CONTENTS
Cover
Table of Contents
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgements
Introduction
The Inventor of Souls
Notes
1 1930s Paris and the Cahier d’un retour au pays natal: ‘It is beautiful and good and legitimate to be nègre’
The 1939 Edition of Cahier d’un retour au pays natal
Notes
2 Wartime Martinique, Tropiques, and Les Armes miraculeuses: ‘Open the windows. Air. Air’
Les Armes miraculeuses
Et les chiens se taisaient
Notes
3 Departmentalisation, Soleil cou coupé and Corps perdu: ‘I shall command the islands to exist’
Cultural Connections and Poetic Reinventions
Soleil cou coupé
Corps perdu
Notes
4 The Political Upheavals of the 1950s: ‘History I tell of the awakening of Africa’
Anticolonial Culture at the Time of African Decolonisation
Ferrements
Notes
5 The Theatre of Decolonisation: ‘One does not invent a tree, one plants it’
The Drama of the Haitian Revolution: Toussaint Louverture and La Tragédie du roi Christophe
Une Saison au Congo
Une Tempête
Notes
6 Political and Poetic Disillusionment: ‘I inhabit a sacred wound’
moi, laminaire…
Comme un malentendu de salut
Notes
Afterword
Notes
Bibliography
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Begin Reading
Afterword
Bibliography
Index
End User License Agreement
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Black Lives series
Elvira Basevich, W. E. B. Du Bois
Nigel C. Gibson, Frantz Fanon
Jane Hiddleston, Aimé Césaire
Denise Lynn, Claudia Jones
Utz McKnight, Frances E. W. Harper
Joshua Myers, Cedric Robinson
Sherrow O. Pinder, David Walker
Aimé Césaire
Inventor of Souls
Jane Hiddleston
polity
Copyright © Jane Hiddleston 2025
The right of Jane Hiddleston to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2025 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4979-5
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2024940613
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website:politybooks.com
Acknowledgements
George Owers at Polity Press contacted me in August 2020, in the wake of the brutal murder of George Floyd, to ask me to write this book on Aimé Césaire for the new Black Lives series. The press wanted to develop the series to explore the history of black activism behind the contemporary protests, to offer the long view of antiracist thought and recognise the contributions of a range of key antiracist figures. Having taught Césaire’s poetry and thought for at least fifteen years and having written on various aspects of his work in several publications, I was delighted to have this opportunity to produce a full analysis of his long and productive career and his copious writing. The project has given me the opportunity to immerse myself in his many political essays, poems and plays to discover a rich, complex and multifaceted oeuvre. I am immensely grateful to Polity for offering me this opportunity to contribute to the Black Lives series by working on this important and enriching thinker. Julia Davies and Helena Heaton have been encouraging and flexible editors, whose efficiency has helped enormously in bringing the book to fruition.
I am grateful to the Rector and Fellows of Exeter College Oxford for granting me two terms of sabbatical in 2023, during which I was able to work on the book. I am particularly grateful to the librarian Joanna Bowring for purchasing the 1978 edition of Tropiques and allowing me to keep the volumes on my desk throughout this project. Nick Hearn at the Taylor Institution also kindly bought many crucial volumes, including all the Écrits politiques, which have been central to the book. I am also grateful to the many students with whom I’ve discussed Césaire, from the first years who studied the Cahier to the final-year and graduate students who chose courses on race and negritude and kept me revisiting Césaire. This book has also benefited greatly from dialogues I’ve had with several colleagues and friends. James Arnold has been a supportive advisor from the start, offering helpful suggestions along the way and perceptive comments on the manuscript in its final stages. Clare Finburgh-Delijani has been a most lively and energising interlocutor on Césaire and negritude for the last couple of years, giving me lucid pointers on some of my writing but also many inspiring conversations on race, anticolonialism, ecopoetics and much more. Cécile Bishop has read some of my related work, and it has been great to share ideas with her over the last few years. Many other colleagues have contributed through debates at conferences and seminars or through informal conversations, and I am indebted to them all. Colin and Natasha have been my constant companions and patient listeners, their love and support makes me what I am. The book is dedicated to my sister Anna, my longest ally. I’m so thrilled that, alongside everything else, we came to share this interest in Césaire.
Jane Hiddleston, Exeter College Oxford, July 2024.
Introduction
On 22 May 2020, the 172nd anniversary of the abolition of slavery in the French colonies, activists in Martinique tore down two statues of the French abolitionist Victor Schoelcher. Schoelcher had been writing and lobbying against slavery since 1833, and was responsible for the decree finally passed by the Second Republic on 27 April 1848 that definitively abolished slavery in all French colonies. Schoelcher condemned slavery in all its forms, dismissed attempts at a protracted transition, and insisted that an end to slavery was both an ethical and an economic imperative. Yet whilst Schoelcher’s influence on abolition was crucial, he did not fight this battle alone. Abolition was the consequence of years of revolts by enslaved people in the French Caribbean, notably those led by Toussaint Louverture in Haiti (that finally led to independence in 1804) and by Louis Delgrès in Guadeloupe in 1802 (that was violently quashed). In Martinique, the activists who destroyed the statues of Schoelcher in 2020 acted in the name of those who revolted after the 27th April decree but before news of the decree had reached Martinique. Insisting that ‘Schoelcher is not our saviour’, they sought to commemorate not the great French benefactor but workers at the Habitation Duchamp in Sainte Philomène, who caused an uprising in Saint Pierre that led to the authorisation of the treaty that outlawed slavery in Martinique on 23 May. The celebration of Schoelcher’s memory through the statues was regarded as a misrepresentative veneration of French benevolence and, even more, as a symbol in defence of the colonial project, at the same time as it eclipsed the agency of Martinicans in claiming their own freedom.
As a great spokesman for the freedom and equality of black people, Aimé Césaire may, if he had lived to see the destruction of the statues, have had some sympathy with the activists’ cause. But if we consider the work of Césaire in relation to contemporary activism, it is striking that his response to Schoelcher is radically different. In fighting tirelessly for equal rights for Martinicans, Césaire situates his work as part of the ongoing legacy of that of his great forebears, Toussaint Louverture and Victor Schoelcher. He refers repeatedly to Schoelcher as an exemplary figure, and notably wrote the introduction to Schoelcher’s Esclavage et colonisation on the centenary of abolition in 1948. In a speech celebrating Schoelcher delivered on 21 July 1945, Césaire speaks in impassioned tones of Schoelcher’s honesty, courage, conscience, audacity and generosity, and indeed characterises his own eulogy as ‘a statue made in sound’.1 He evidently does not shy away from the form of monumentalisation to which the 2020 activists objected. In the same speech, Césaire notes that Schoelcher reminded his opponents, who tried to argue that black people were not seeking their own freedom, of the multiple slave revolts precisely demanding liberation. In the 1948 preface to Schoelcher’s book referenced above, Césaire goes on to affirm that his legacy goes beyond abolitionism, characterising him as a revolutionary. Charting the abortive attempts of some of Schoelcher’s predecessors as well as the hypocritical, racist discourse of his detractors, Césaire lauds Schoelcher’s categorical calls for immediate and definitive abolition. He also notes Schoelcher’s continued endeavour, following abolition, to promote the economic and political emancipation of black people, and to pursue assimilation and federation, principles for which Césaire himself would fight throughout his own career a century later.
The distance between Césaire’s adulatory rhetoric and the denunciation of Schoelcher by the protestors who removed his statues tells us something about Césaire’s own form of activism. His critique of colonialism was voiced not on the streets but at the Assemblée Nationale, where he was Deputy for Martinique for forty-eight years between 1945 and 1993. His legacy is a model not so much for grassroots activism as for exemplary, inspiring, but considered leadership. It is also an extraordinarily prolific corpus of political, cultural and poetic writing, in which the contemporary reader can find careful analyses as well as incendiary rhetoric. In praising Schoelcher, moreover, Césaire distinguishes himself as a careful reader of his work, attentive to its detail and to its time. He repeatedly evokes the contemporary relevance of the abolitionist’s vision and conceives his own work as imbued with the spirit of Schoelcher. And yet Césaire also reads him in his historical context and is able to identify the nuances that would no longer be appropriate in the twentieth century. In a speech delivered in 1958, for example, he evokes Schoelcher’s lack of reference to class, his conception of the people as ‘that great undifferentiated entity’, and recommends a more nuanced awareness of social antagonism in the contemporary context. Schoelcher, then, is an ongoing interlocutor for Césaire, but his ideas ‘bear the mark of his time’.2 We might remark on his achievements, but we must adapt his pursuit of liberation to suit the demands of the present: ‘to bear homage to 1848 is good, but it is better to keep in step with 1958’.3 If Césaire is able to read Schoelcher in his own time, this book seeks to understand his resonance by reading Césaire in his. Césaire maintains Schoelcher’s revolutionary spirit rather than dismissing his inevitable association with French colonialism, as the 2020 activists did. He models an understanding of history that we must endeavour to preserve as we make our way through his own complex, evolving and multifaceted trajectory.
Closer scrutiny of the Schoelcher statues is revealing. Two statues of Schoelcher were destroyed, but the statues were not identical. One depicts Schoelcher with his arm around a young slave boy, who looks up at him with admiration. This one sat in front of the Palais de Justice in Fort-de-France, the capital of Martinique, with the inscription ‘no French land shall any longer bear slaves’. It was made by a Frenchman, Anatole Marquet de Vasselot, in 1904. The other statue, situated in the town named Schoelcher, was by the Martinican Marie-Thérèse Julien Lung Fou, who was also a pioneer for writing and cultural production in Creole. Lung Fou’s Schoelcher stood alone, seemed to gaze into the distance, and took a much more minimalist form than that of Vasselot. If the first statue conveys French dominance, the second does so markedly less. If Césaire recognised the beauty of Vasselot’s Schoelcher, moreover, he also noted that it was sculpted by a white man. And in 1971, he celebrated the construction of a further statue by the Martinican artist Joseph Sainte Croix René Corail, known as Khokho René Corail, this time not of Schoelcher but taking the abstract form of a woman clutching her dead child while brandishing a weapon. The statue is conceived as a ‘Homage to the struggles of the Martinican people’ and symbolises the 22nd May slave revolt that finally triggered the treaty for abolition. It serves as a fitting rejoinder to the monuments devoted to Schoelcher, and Césaire is keen to underline its resonance. Whereas the Schoelcher statues depict freedom being bestowed upon Martinicans by a Frenchman, that of René Corail portrays a black woman seizing her own freedom. Césaire’s understanding of Schoelcher’s contribution to abolition may have meant that he would not have seen it fitting to tear down his statue, but his recognition of the importance of René Corail’s work suggests that he was keenly aware of the thorny politics of memorialisation. Yet his activism is one of well-informed but dynamic reading, of dialogue and creativity: René Corail with Schoelcher rather than against, but with a sceptical eye towards the mythologisation of the past.
The Inventor of Souls
This book takes Césaire’s vision of writers and artists as ‘inventors of souls’ as a starting point for the conceptualisation of this unique mode of contestation expressed both through politics and through literature. Whilst Césaire’s activism was above all that of an intellectual – a man of culture who sought change from within the corridors of power – it was nonetheless incendiary. He was a visionary in both his political and his poetic ambition. His explosive address at the Deuxième congrès des écrivains et artistes noirs held in Rome in 1959 captures this visionary ambition in its virulent denunciation of colonialism and its call for the wholesale reinvention of culture as integral to complete decolonisation, as he invokes his colleagues: ‘we are propagators of souls, multipliers of souls, even inventors of souls’.4 Césaire secured the status of a French department for Martinique in 1946, but he was soon disillusioned by the failed promises of that law, and by 1959 was yet more damning in his critique of colonialism and more rebellious in seeking autonomy for his country. The speech at the Deuxième Congrès reflects this anger and sense of betrayal, but also articulates a close connection between culture and politics. With literary and artistic creation, he intones, ‘unexpected physical resources rise up which contribute to the re-establishment of the social body that was shaken by the shock of colonialism through its ability to resist and vocation to take action’.5 The phrase ‘inventor of souls’ bears traces of Césaire’s Marxism, but replaces Joseph Stalin’s reference to writers as ‘engineers of the soul’ in his speech at the First Congress of the Union of Soviet Writers in 1932 with the more experimental, improvised notion of invention. Césaire left the French Communist Party in 1956, criticising both its association with Stalinism and its failure to consider the effects of colonialism and racism, yet the notion of the ‘inventor of souls’ suggests a renewed vision for democratic socialism through art. In the letter probably written by Suzanne Césaire and signed by Aimé Césaire and his colleagues in response to the censorship of the avant-garde journal Tropiques in Martinique in 1943, the contributors are also ‘poisoners of the soul’. Whilst Césaire blended his poetry with his politics explicitly only from the mid-1950s, this early riposte indicates the strong contestatory effect he sought for the literary journal even before his political career was launched.6
Césaire’s visionary call to the ‘inventors of souls’ in 1959 crystallises his growing belief in the complicity, if not the resemblance, between culture and politics. His best-known work, the epic poem Cahier d’un retour au pays natal [Notebook of a Return to the Native Land], was first published in 1939 in the journal Volontés, and in its initial incarnation took the form of a spiritual quest, a journey of self-transformation that was not yet explicitly political. When the final version of the poem was published by Présence Africaine in 1956, however, Césaire’s visionary blend of aesthetic and political revolt became clearly visible in the poem’s vocabulary of defiance. Césaire’s 1959 address at the Deuxième Congrès was also a continuation of his speech ‘Culture et colonisation’ delivered at the Premier Congrès des intellectuels et artistes noirs held in Paris in 1956, where he outlines the devastating effect of colonialism on local cultures and summons his colleagues to strive for the regeneration of black culture.7 The point is reinforced in his address at the Festival mondial des arts nègres in Dakar in 1966, where he argues that African art is crucial to the restoration of the dignity and humanity of the people as they free themselves from oppressive colonial regimes. Decolonisation in Africa sharpened Césaire’s denunciation of French colonialism in the Caribbean, and the 1950s and 60s saw both a radicalisation in Césaire’s literary writing and an intensification in his demand for political autonomy in Martinique.
The vocabulary of invention that stands out in the 1959 speech is at the same time an apt signifier of the explosive language characteristic of Césaire’s poetry, as well as of his political speeches and essays. Césaire’s unique activist power lies in his unrivalled linguistic mastery, in the unprecedented aesthetic experimentation of his poetry and theatre, and in the rhetorical force of his political interventions. He was the producer of ‘incandescent speech’, a lexical and formal inventiveness that makes his poetry revolutionary in both content and form, and that makes his political speeches boldly hard-hitting in their retort to the seat of power. His lasting significance stems no doubt from the inspiring power of this visionary language, his sharp excoriation of the evils of colonial history as well as of ongoing racism, and his vision of renewal on both a cultural and a political level. Volcanic imagery runs through many of Césaire’s poetic volumes and represents this explosive linguistic energy. The massive eruption of Mount Pelée in 1902 that devastated the city of Saint Pierre is remembered as a catastrophe in Martinican history, but it also repeatedly returns in Césaire’s poems as a figure for incendiary revolt, for a force capable of sweeping away cultural and political stagnation in favour of renewal. Linking the prevalence of the volcano in Césaire’s poetic imaginary with his inflammatory style throughout his writing, the Guadeloupean writer Daniel Maximin aptly dubs him ‘brother volcano’.8
The eruptive challenge of Césaire’s poetry can be read as a fierce expression of visceral revolt in a language he could not use in the political arena. Yet his political speeches also intensify their rhetorical impact through their linguistic crafting. At the Assemblée Nationale, his proposal for departmentalisation and, soon after and for much of his career, his calls to the French government to fulfil the promises offered in that status, do not hold back in conjuring the difficult living conditions endured in Martinique, and his demands both for specific rights and eventually for autonomy are articulated with force and erudition. Yet Césaire’s unique achievements originate in part in his ability to think and to speak on different levels, to produce the most inventive poetry whilst taking on the role of a practical negotiator. While he was criticised by later Caribbean thinkers for pushing for departmentalisation rather than independence, Césaire was an anticolonial throughout; he conceived departmentalisation as a means of securing equality for Martinicans when he believed that full independence was, at least for the time being, economically unrealistic. With departmentalisation, Césaire worked with Republican ideology and drew on the rhetoric of the rights of man to demand that the Republic adhere more faithfully to its own principles. For Thomas Hale and Kora Véron, departmentalisation was ‘the art of the possible’; Césaire knew how to envision revolution but sought departmental status for Martinique in order to address quickly problems such as food shortages and the high cost of living in Martinique.9 Césaire nevertheless always thought of himself as a rebel, a marginal figure or interloper even in his interactions with the establishment.10 Césaire’s ability to play the two roles of the visionary and the negotiator at once makes him an exemplary figure for contemporary antiracist cultural innovation and political action, and it is his linguistic agility in both fields that lends his work its exceptional power. His powers of persuasion as a poet and as a politician offer a singular model of both cultural and political activism.
Césaire’s early years provide the starting point for this unusual trajectory. He was born in 1913 at the Habitation Eyma in North-East Martinique. His father Fernand was a tax inspector, and his mother Eleanor Hermine was a dressmaker. His father’s role meant that the family belonged to the petit bourgeoisie while remaining close to the working class, and the young Aimé would have been well aware of the difficulties of life on the plantations. The family valued education especially highly as a conduit to success, and Fernand used to read French classics to his children in the evenings. Aimé Césaire’s grandfather Nicolas Fernand Césaire was the first Martinican to go to the prestigious École normale supérieure in Paris, though he died young, at the age of 28. His grandmother Eugénie Macni was also a significant figure in his childhood: she had excellent French and taught Aimé to read at a young age. French was very much privileged as the language of education, with the result that Césaire never considered writing in Creole – a decision for which he was later criticised, even though his attitude was reflective of the culture of his time.11 He also grew up with an awareness of the history of enslavement, and it appears that one of his ancestors was involved in a slave revolt in December 1833 and condemned to death by Louis-Philippe. Césaire’s biographer Georges Ngal notes that the young Aimé was particularly affected by this story of a rebel slave with the name Césaire, though it is not certain that the condemned man was actually related to Aimé Césaire’s family.12 In 1924, Césaire obtained a scholarship to the Collège Schoelcher in Fort-de-France, and the family moved to the city, though he missed the rural landscape where he was born. Here he met Léon Gontron Damas, later a co-founder of the negritude movement, but his studious attitude meant he was often isolated.
In September 1931, Césaire won a scholarship to study in France, and made the two-week journey by boat to enrol at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris. He was then successful in the tough competition for entry into the prestigious Ecole normale supérieure, where he continued his studies from 1935. His years in Paris were a turning point in his life, the significance of which it is difficult to overestimate. Soon after arriving he met the writers (and later politicians) Léopold Sédar Senghor and Ousmane Socé, both from Senegal. They quickly befriended him, and he started to discover Africa. This discovery provided the seeds for what was to become the negritude movement and convinced him of the significance of Africa as the original source of Caribbean identity before its decimation by the slave trade. Césaire developed this conviction also through reading the work of European ethnographers, such as Leo Frobenius’s Histoire de la civilisation africaine and Maurice Delafosse’s Les Nègres.
The years that he spent in Paris were not easy: he struggled with his health and with a sense of alienation, studied hard but was often isolated. Senghor not only offered friendship but a sense of racial identity, the conviction that black people shared their origins in Africa and that a reconnection with their roots could serve as a catalyst for cultural regeneration. Paris during the 1930s was a vibrant site of black internationalism, with pan-Africanist movements gathering in the city to debate and share ideas. It was here that Césaire discovered the work of the Nardal sisters, Paulette and Jane, whose salons and journal, the Revue du monde noir, formed a meeting point for francophone Africans and Caribbeans as well as for African American writers such as Claude McKay, Alan Locke and Langston Hughes. Césaire would also have been aware of Légitime Défense, a journal whose single issue published in 1932 was also preoccupied with the question of race, combined with a commitment to Marxism and a surrealist aesthetic. Césaire nevertheless kept a guarded distance from both journals and from the salons, seeing them as rather too bourgeois and assimilationist, but edited and contributed to L’Étudiant noir in 1934–5 with his first reflections on black identity and culture. Césaire’s Cahier was also born during this period, with early drafts originating in 1935 before the first version was published in 1939, the same year that Césaire returned to Martinique.
Césaire took a post as a teacher at the Lycée Schoelcher in Fort-de-France soon after his return. But Martinique during the 1940s was a place of oppression and the poet’s return to his homeland was one of disillusionment. The island was under the control of the Vichy government, represented by Admiral Robert whose regime was racist and divisive. Together with his wife Suzanne, René Ménil and several other colleagues, Césaire founded the avant-garde journal Tropiques, which set out to celebrate the local culture and landscape and to resist the stultification of the Vichy regime. The journal was closed down for a period during 1943 until the Free French took control of the island, however, since although its focus was literary rather than political, Lieutenant de Vaisseau Bayle (the Chief of Information Services for the government) denounced its revolutionary tenor. In 1945 Césaire, having hitherto not seen himself as a political figure, was elected Mayor of Fort-de-France, as well as Deputy for Martinique representing the Communist Party, at the Assemblée Nationale. With the end of the war, Césaire sought a fresh start for Martinique with the departmentalisation bill, with which he argued that whilst Martinique and Guadeloupe were fully assimilated with the metropole on an administrative and political level, this had not been translated into the domain of social justice. The cost of living was as high as in France, but salaries were low and there were no benefits for maternity, sickness, unemployment or retirement.13 After the hierarchy and misery of the Vichy regime, Césaire called for ‘France d’outre-mer’ to represent a genuine fraternity, part of a united but diverse Republic that would relinquish the old master–slave relationship and usher in fresh hope.14 Departmentalisation was in this sense an anticolonial move for Césaire, in that it was to terminate Martinique’s subordinate status.
Departmentalisation was passed unanimously in March 1946, but Césaire’s optimism was short-lived. Although he, as well as the Martinican people, had hoped that liberation from the Nazis and the transformation of Martinique and Guadeloupe into overseas departments would bring the end of racial discrimination, this was far from the case. In an incendiary article published in Justice in September 1949, Césaire spoke out ‘against the sabotage of assimilation’.15 The administration of Martinique was in the hands of the colonialist Préfet Trouillé, who extended the property rights of the ‘békés’ (or white landowners) and failed to put in place social security for black workers. Césaire warned that if the situation did not improve, then the Martinican people would demand a rethinking of their status.16 This disillusionment grew into a sense of angry betrayal, as Césaire continued through the 1950s to draw attention at the Assemblée Nationale to ongoing discrimination, low salaries, the lack of social security and insufficient investment.
This period brought a renewed revolutionary fervour into Césaire’s writing. His explosive critique of colonialism, Discours sur le colonialisme [Discourse on Colonialism], was published by Présence Africaine in 1955, though parts of the text were published as ‘L’impossible contact’ in Chemins du monde as far back as 1948. The text starkly equates colonialism with Nazism and argues that Europe’s dehumanising colonial enterprise finally unfolded on its own territory with the horrors of National Socialism. At the same time, the surrealist visions of Césaire’s earlier poetry, such as Les Armes miraculeuses [The Miraculous Weapons] of 1946 and Soleil cou coupé [Solar Throat Slashed] of 1948, are dampened and interwoven in Ferrements [Ferraments], published in 1960, with overt political critique. It is also in the late 1950s that Césaire started work on his tragedies of decolonisation, turning to the theatre to address a broader audience more directly. Whilst Et les chiens se taisaient [And the dogs were silent], first published as part of Les Armes miraculeuses [The Miraculous Weapons] in 1946, portrays the murder of the slave master by the slave in a timeless, universalised form indebted to Greek tragedy, La Tragédie du Roi Christophe [The Tragedy of King Christophe] of 1963 and Une Saison au Congo [A Season in the Congo] of 1966 are historical studies of the troubled aftermath of decolonisation in Haiti and the Congo. Une Tempête [A Tempest], published in 1969, follows the tragedies of decolonisation with a riposte to Shakespeare’s classic placing the slave Caliban’s revolt centre stage while also incorporating African and Voodoo references.
The most widely known aspect of this first part of Césaire’s career is his invention of negritude, the cultural movement that first sought defiantly to reinvent black identity in robust defiance of colonial and racist discourse. Whilst negritude was a provocative and controversial term, its role in the development of antiracism was decisive. The regime of enslavement in the French Caribbean may have ended with abolition in 1848, but exploitation and inequality continued in a society that remained brutally hierarchical. A pigmentocracy persisted, which situated those ethnic groups with the palest skin at the top of the hierarchy, with those with the darkest skin at the bottom. Negritude was a concerted movement to overturn that hierarchy, to affirm the value of black culture and to reinvigorate its origins in Africa. If contemporary movements such as Black Lives Matter are founded on the affirmation of the value of black lives, culture and history, and on resistance to ongoing oppression, such endeavours clearly find their roots in the cultural and political energy of negritude as it emerged in the 1930s. Together with Léopold Sédar Senghor and Léon Gontran Damas, and with the influence of the effervescent black internationalism of 1930s Paris, Césaire coined the term ‘negritude’ at the very start of his career. His continuing championing of black culture and black rights over the first decades of his career can be construed, despite its tensions, under its banner.
Negritude started with L’Étudiant noir, the journal of the Association des Étudiants Martiniquais edited by Césaire and Senghor, in 1935. In an article printed in the third issue, ‘Nègreries: Conscience raciale et évolution sociale’, Césaire announces the precondition for revolution: ‘to break with the mechanistic identification of races, to destroy superficial values, to seize within us the unmediated nègre, to plant our negritude like a beautiful tree until it bears its most authentic fruit’.17 Negritude is here a refusal of racism and a quest for authenticity, calling for the embrace of lived experience as well as a new cultural productivity. It heralds the inauguration of a long-term commitment to establishing connections between black people across the world through the celebration of African culture and history. Despite his lack of personal knowledge of Africa and his reliance on Senghor and Frobenius, Césaire associated the affirmation of negritude with a renewed connection with Africa as the originary home of black culture and identity. Yet if he goes on to use the term several times in the Cahier, Césaire keeps its meaning dynamic. Negritude is not, despite the objections of many critics, the affirmation of particular characteristics, and it is not the name for a pre-established, static identity. It is used in the Cahier to describe the first uprising of slaves in Haiti, under Toussaint Louverture, and is associated with protest rather than identity. It describes not a state of being but an action or process, a reintegration with the land in defiance of a history of alienation:
Ma négritude n’est pas une pierre, sa surdité ruée contre la clameur du jour
ma négritude n’est pas une taie d’eau morte sur l’oeil mort de la terre
ma négritude n’est ni une tour ni une cathédrale
elle plonge dans la chair rouge du sol
elle plonge dans la chair ardente du ciel
elle troue l’accablement opaque de sa droite patience
[My negritude is not a stone, its deafness hurled against the
clamor of day
my negritude is not a leukoma of dead liquid over the
earth’s dead eye
my negritude is neither tower nor cathedral
it takes root in the red flesh of the soil
it takes root in the ardent flesh of the sky
it breaks through the opaque prostration with its upright presence.]18
Negritude for Césaire is dynamic, and serves as a starting point for revolt rather than as an essentialising definition of black identity. It is also a cultural movement and does not uphold biological conceptions of race. In this, it differs from the negritude celebrated by Léopold Sédar Senghor, who at least early in his career sought to celebrate the particular characteristics that make up the black soul. Senghor’s early evocations of negritude foreground sensuality, the close connection between mind and body, and contrast what he sees as the black man’s affectivity with the rationality of European culture: ‘emotion is negro just as reason is Greek’.19 Senghor’s early use of biological essentialism was clearly highly problematic and met with intense criticism, although it is often ignored that negritude shifts in meaning through his writing, and later becomes both more cultural and more dynamic. Yet Césaire’s version was always cultural and always dynamic, and the risk of essentialism was one of which he was evidently aware. In the 1966 speech at the Dakar Festival mondial des arts nègres, he expresses with hindsight his unease towards the term and regrets its history of creating tension between antiracist thinkers.20 Yet importantly, despite its difficulties, Césaire insists on the significance of the term in responding to the history of brutality against black people. It fuelled the burgeoning of black culture in the 1930s, established solidarity between black people in different parts of the world, and in turn gave strength to the African independence movements of the 1960s.
Negritude is crucial to Césaire’s contribution to antiracist thought, but this book seeks to demonstrate its shifting and multifaceted meaning, which is crucial to its relevance to contemporary activism. Césaire retains the term, despite his discomfort, precisely because it offered the first great challenge to racist dehumanisation. It redefined and reinvigorated black culture when white discourse had tried to reduce it to a caricature. It responded to a specific history of black suffering but was also a form of universal humanism in its affirmation of freedom and emancipation: ‘if Negritude is a rooting in the particular, it also transcends this and blossoms into the universal’.21 At the same time, negritude is a catalyst for fraternity or solidarity, and in this it can be seen to anticipate the foundation of more recent movements such as Black Lives Matter, which too crafts itself as ‘an inclusive and spacious movement’ that seeks to restore and affirm black people’s humanity.22
Critical responses to negritude nevertheless vary, with many detractors rejecting what they see as its essentialism. The Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka famously dismissed it, mocking the term with the remark that ‘the tiger does not proclaim its tigritude’.23 The Africanist literary scholar Francis Abiola Irele claims in his substantial introduction to the Cahier that Césaire’s form of negritude there is associated with racial endowment and can be seen as ‘hyperromanticism’.24 These claims seem not to take into account both the dynamic imagery surrounding negritude in Césaire’s writing or his own explicit theorisation of it as lived experience, as ‘refusal’ and ‘combat’.25 Jean Khalfa’s recent interpretation seems more apt:
this is not a racial category, the claim of an essential difference or another border. In fact, it denotes the refusal of a specific ontological attitude, the exclusively instrumental stance of those who can only think in terms of mastery, that is, in terms of the separation of the self from the other, and the rediscovery of another stance.26
A study of the association of Césaire’s work with negritude should nevertheless do justice to the diversity of his intellectual and political universe rather than reducing it to anything resembling a single programme. His early poetry is more personal than political, and although the Cahier was composed during Césaire’s period in Paris surrounded by the black internationalism of the 1930s, the 1939 version is more of a spiritual quest for transformation than a collective, activist endeavour. This early Cahier shows evidence of his reading of Frobenius not only in its references to African culture, but also in its vision of spiritual transformation. It is also clearly influenced by Frobenius’s conception of Ethiopian civilisation, where man is seen to be tightly implicated in the environment through the concept of the ‘homme-plante’, celebrated by Suzanne Césaire.
Césaire’s Cahier – and, indeed, all his poetry – closely links the human with the ecological, with both specific forms of local vegetation and with the larger forces of the elements. Tropiques is devoted to exploring Martinican culture as intricately immersed in its flora and fauna. In the essay ‘Poésie et connaissance’, published in 1945, Césaire imagines the poet containing within him the dynamic life of the nonhuman world around him. The humanism championed in Césaire’s negritude is importantly not a sovereign humanism but one that understands the relationship between human and nonhuman in ways that challenge the history of environmental destruction in the Caribbean and that can speak to the contemporary climate crisis.
At the same time, the quest for liberation and transformation initiated by negritude during this period is coupled with or enriched by Césaire’s engagement with surrealism. Césaire’s poetry particularly during his earlier years challenges the putatively rational underpinnings of colonial and racial theory by drawing on the surrealist affirmation of the irrational. The 1939 Cahier’s quest for spiritual transformation is also a personal journey into the unconscious, where liberation is evoked using startling erotic imagery and aesthetic experimentation more pervasively than with imagery of political revolt. Césaire was closely connected with surrealism at this point, as is testified by the first publication of the Cahier in Volontés, a literary magazine for the avant-garde. He met André Breton during the latter’s visit to Martinique in 1941; Breton then wrote the preface for the revised, bilingual version of the Cahier published in New York by Brentano’s in 1947, and that revised version was perhaps the most linguistically explosive in its deployment of surrealist imagery. With Breton, Césaire pursued freedom from a history of oppression but also from normative social structures and aesthetic tradition. Cultural freedom had to involve the unfettered liberation of the imagination and a disruption of existing forms of versification, of familiar lexis and syntax. With its surrealist influences, negritude has also been as a form of modernism, a challenge to the existing literary order and an attempt to disrupt the limits of meaning.27
Beyond negritude, ecology and surrealism, however, Césaire became in the late 1950s and 1960s more focused on decolonisation, its implications in Africa and the form it might take in the French Caribbean. The politicisation of his poetry, with Ferrements [Ferraments] and the tragedies of decolonisation mentioned above, coincided with a new turn in Césaire’s politics, in that he started to push for political autonomy in Martinique. A decisive turn came in 1956, when he broke with the French Communist Party, though he remained committed to Marxist principles in his conception of a more egalitarian political system for Martinique. In 1958 he founded the Parti Progressiste Martiniquais, which sought a degree of autonomy for the island, articulated as somewhere between assimilation and full autonomy, but within a larger federal state.28 This would confer upon Martinique the power to manage its own affairs but would not require national state sovereignty; rather, federalism would maintain the connection with France that the island required economically while assuring self-government. This conception of autonomy continued to evolve over the next decade, as the notion of a federal union became less realistic and less appealing and he became more convinced of the need for Martinique to attain the status of a state, governing its own affairs within a federal Republic. At the same time, however, Césaire’s literary output slowed, as his energies were devoted to the political cause. The late volume of poetry, moi, laminaire… [i, laminaria…] published in 1982, also marks a shift in its move away from political activism. The collection’s tone is far more humble than that of his earlier works, as the vision of the poet as spokesman has disappeared and the poetic self is no longer at the centre. Rather, the poems invoke the Martinican landscape, the traces of the history of enslavement and the vast cosmic forces that remind us of our human frailty.
Yet Césaire is unique in his vibrant, original and prolonged double life as poet and politician. His combination of poetry and politics is rarely seen in our present historical moment, where culture may be politically motivated but is rarely imbricated in the political arena in the way that it was for Césaire, and where literature is too often driven by market forces. Césaire understood that there was a leap between his poetic and political work and the modes of thinking that accompanied them, and he recognised the difference between his ideal vision of revolutionary change and the immediate demands of the concrete sphere. In an interview with Jacqueline Sieger in 1961, he admits that, ‘I’ve never wanted to separate dream from action. But there is always a deep hiatus’.29 The postcolonial critic Mireille Rosello analyses the two strains in Césaire’s thought in her article ‘The Césaire Effect’, noting that major critics such as Lilyan Kesteloot conceive these as paradoxical, characterising Césaire as a ‘homo duplex’.30 And certainly Césaire became a controversial figure in Martinique from the late 50s, when he failed to fight for independence and his continuing belief in the importance of the connection with France was seen to betray the more revolutionary tenor of his poetry at that stage. Nevertheless, Rosello concludes that Césaire’s political and poetic visions are not so distinct; in both he is committed to an understanding of reinvention that is not necessarily violent but that is radical. Furthermore, Césaire scholars Thomas Hale and Kora Véron answer in the affirmative the question ‘is there unity in the writings of Aimé Césaire?’, and examine moments in his career when particular political struggles were obliquely though still identifiably reflected in poems written at the same time.31 Césaire himself articulates the complicity between poetry and politics with a commitment to creativity: ‘creating a poem and creating a city are to some extent the same thing. What animates me is the will to create, the will to do, to build in the present and in the future’.32
There are, however, clearly many ways to paint Césaire, many dimensions to his thought, and many interpretations of his diverse writings. This study seeks to capture this dynamism and to identify the complex interweaving of currents and threads through his politics and poetry without reducing him to a particular stance or movement. As we saw at the beginning in his response to Schoelcher and René Corail, he maintained a dialogue between France and Martinique, between negotiation and activism, and between the visionary and the pragmatic. His thought shifted and evolved through his long career, with emancipation as a constant goal but with many languages conceived in its name. This singular trajectory was, moreover, one of constant tension. Euzhan Palcy’s documentary films portray him as a figure of conflict and contradiction, and biographers and friends note a sense of isolation as he tried to work on multiple levels when other critics and commentators chose more specific cultural or political approaches.33 If he was on some level a father figure for successive generations of Caribbean writers, moreover, their memory of him contains tensions, as is testified most extensively by Raphaël Confiant in his acerbic study Aimé Césaire, une traversée paradoxale du siècle. The popular Guadeloupean writer Maryse Condé asserts that, despite his contradictions, Césaire’s devotion to Martinique makes him an exemplary cultural figure for the Caribbean: unlike some of the other major francophone Caribbean writers, he lived in his native land for most of his life.34 Yet despite her own attention to the intersection between race and gender, Condé does not mention here another of Césaire’s difficulties; that is, his failure to consider the distinct position of black women. Césaire’s poetic rhetoric was at times androcentric, using the imagery of virility to conjure revolution and containing scant reference to women’s experiences of racial oppression. It is surprising, moreover, that in celebrating the René Corail statue, Césaire evokes the agency of the black subject but says nothing about the fact that the statue is in this case a woman.
Despite his difficulties, Césaire was an impressive embodiment of a particular form of intellectual activism along the lines of that of major French thinkers such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, André Malraux or Simone de Beauvoir. He can be associated with a twentieth-century French model of political engagement in that he conceived literature as a project that must pursue freedom. Sartre and his colleagues responded to the Nazi Occupation of France by writing literature that theorised both the ontological and the political freedom of the subject, and indeed for Sartre this evolved into an impassioned call during the 1950s for the decolonisation of Algeria. Césaire went further: his literary writing voiced and performed first subjective and then collective revolt, but his political engagement was not just that of a commentator. Rather, it was that of a determined negotiator and actor. His achievements as an intellectual are unique in that he was the first black man in the French-speaking world to play that role with such scope and such success, and he also used his skills not just to critique the establishment from the outside, but to effect change from within in his position at the Assemblée Nationale. Césaire dissects and rewrites black history in his poetry and theatre while using his powers of analysis and expression to advocate for the rights of Martinicans. He embodies a model of engagement that is highly unusual in our contemporary era but that serves as a resonant example in its combination of cultural activism with political influence and power. He can be seen, according to one of his biographers, Romuald Fonkoua, as the last of a generation of French intellectuals to ally literature and politics and to rise to the challenge of both. His example shows how cultural movements, such as negritude, can parallel practical politics and how crucially important the awareness they bring can be in fuelling political change.
Césaire was an inspirational leader. Known as the ‘founding father’ of negritude, he remains (despite the ambivalent paternalism implied by that status) a crucial source of inspiration to subsequent Caribbean writers such as Patrick Chamoiseau and Daniel Maximin, who repeatedly affirm his importance to their work. At the same time, he serves as a model for considered, dignified, reasoned political leadership; he addressed a predominantly white administration from within, as have negotiators such as Barack Obama and Kamala Harris. All aspects of his work provide, according to political scientist Fred Constant, ‘lessons in leadership’, which Constant argues comprise mastery of language, abstract principles, a commitment to the avant-garde while communicating with the people, a belief in the universal as well as in the importance of identity, an indefatigable will, responsibility and empathy.35 Césaire knew well the difficulties associated with the position of the leader, as he demonstrates most clearly in charting the errors of Christophe in newly independent Haiti in La Tragédie du roi Christophe or in portraying Patrice Lumumba’s solipsism in the Belgian Congo after decolonisation in Une Saison au Congo. In his own career, however, despite his intermittent isolation, he sought to combine the role of spokesman with listening and dialogue at once with his own people and with the French establishment.
A need for black leadership was aptly articulated much more recently by Patrisse Cullors, co-founder of the Black Lives Matter movement. In a 2017 interview, Cullors envisions the movement’s next step as an increase in black people’s participation in government: ‘one of the biggest places that I see us will be in local and national government. I think you’ll see not just black people, but black folks and our allies really pushing to be part of local government, city government and national government – to move to be mayor, county board of supervisors, to be on boards’.36 Black Lives Matter has insisted on its loose, decentralised structure, its focus on local rather than national levels of organisation. Cullors clearly imagines not a hierarchical mode of leadership but a collaborative one, with black leader figures working with local and national government as well as with grassroots organisations. Césaire’s model of leadership inevitably situates him in an elite role, but his position at the Assemblée Nationale at the same time as his work as Mayor of Fort-de-France shows how leadership can work on different levels at once. His political writings attest to his commitment to wider forms of empowerment, and his efforts were addressed both to local communities and to the French imperialist centre. He may, in the view of his critics, have struggled to address these different levels at once, but he was a skilled politician who worked for the emancipation of his people both by focusing on local issues and by addressing the highest levels of power. He was also an inspirational writer who led the creation of a modernist French Caribbean culture with his invention of a singular new poetic language and form.
Notes
1.
Aimé Césaire, ‘Hommage à Victor Schoelcher’,
Écrits politiques:
1935–1956
(Paris: Nouvelles Éditions Jean-Michel Place, 2016), pp. 85–9 (p. 86).
2.
Aimé Césaire, ‘Relier Schoelcher’,
Écrits politiques: 1957–1971
(Paris: Nouvelles Éditions Jean-Michel Place, 2016), pp. 55–6 (p. 55).
3.
Aimé Césaire, ‘Jusques à quand ?’,
Écrits politiques: 1957–1971
, pp. 65–6 (p. 66).
4.
Aimé Césaire, ‘L’homme de culture et ses responsabilités’,
Écrits politiques: 1957–1971
, pp. 95–101 (p. 97).
5.
Ibid., pp. 100–1.
6.
Aimé Césaire, ‘Réponse de
Tropiques
à M. le lieutenant de vaisseau Bayle, chef du service d’information’,
Ecrits politiques: 1935–1956
, p. 41.
7.
Aimé Césaire, ‘Culture et colonisation’,
Écrits politiques: 1935–1956
, pp. 357–72.
8.
Daniel Maximin,
Aimé Césaire, frère volcan
(Paris: Seuil, 2013).
9.
Thomas Hale and Kora Véron, ‘Is there unity in the writings of Aimé Césaire’,
Research in African Literatures
41.1 (2010): 46–70 (p. 57).
10.
James Arnold notes an article in
Le Progressiste
on 18 June 2008 using the quotation ‘je suis un nègre marron’ from an undated interview in the Guadeloupian press. See A. James Arnold, ‘Césaire is Dead! Long live Césaire!’,
French Politics, Culture and Society
27.3 (2009): 9–18 (p. 12).
11.
Raphaël Confiant,
Aimé Césaire, une traversée paradoxale du siècle
(Paris: Stock, 1993).
12.
M. a M. Ngal,
Aimé Césaire, un homme à la recherche d’une patrie
(Dakar, Abidjan: Les Nouvelles Editions Africaines, 1975) 21. See also Romuald Fonkoua,
Aimé Césaire
(Paris: Perrin, 2013), p. 30.
13.
See Aimé Césaire, ‘1er Séance du 12 Mars 1946’,
Écrits politiques: Discours à l’Assemblée Nationale 1945–1983
(Paris: Nouvelles Éditions Jean Michel Place, 2013), pp. 27–37.
14.
Ibid., p. 37.
15.
Aimé Césaire, ‘Contre le sabotage de l’assimilation’,
Écrits politiques: 1935–1956
, pp. 197–9.
16.
Ibid., p. 198.
17.
Aimé Césaire, ‘Nègreries: Conscience raciale et révolution sociale’,
Écrits politiques: 1935–1956
, pp. 32–33 (p. 33).
18.
Aimé Césaire,
Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, The Complete Poetry of Aimé Césaire
, trans. James Arnold and Clayton Eshleman (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2017), pp. 42–3.
19.
Léopold Sédar Senghor, ‘Ce que l’homme noir apporte’,
Liberté I: Négritude et humanisme
(Paris: Seuil, 1964), pp. 22–38 (p. 24).
20.
Aimé Césaire, ‘Discours sur l’art africain’,
Écrits politiques: 1957–
1971
, pp. 217–24 (p. 219).
21.
Ibid., p. 220.
22.
See
https://blacklivesmatter.com/about
23.
Wole Soyinka,
The Burden of Memory, the Muse of Forgiveness
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 123.
24.
F. Abiola Irele, ‘Introduction’,
Cahier d’un retour au pays natal/Journal of a Homecoming
, trans. Gregson Davis (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), p. 51.
25.
Aimé Césaire, ‘Discours de Miami: Première conférence hémisphérique des peuples noirs de la diaspora en hommage à Aimé Césaire’,
Écrits politiques 1972–1988
, p. 524.
26.
Jean Khalfa,
Poetics of the Antilles: Poetry, History and Philosophy in the Writings of Perse, Césaire, Fanon and Glissant
(Oxford: Peter Lang, 2017), p. 5.
27.
See A. James Arnold,
Modernism and Negritude: The Poetry and Poetics of Aimé Césaire
(Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1981); Carrie Noland,
Voices of Negritude in Modernist Print: Aesthetic Subjectivity, Diaspora and the Lyric Regime
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2015).
28.
See Aimé Césaire, ‘Pour la transformation de la Martinique en région dans le cadre d’une Union française fédérée’, Rapport présenté au congrès constitutif du PPM, 22 mars 1958,
Écrits politiques: 1957–1971
, pp. 17–28.
29.
‘Entretien avec Aimé Césaire: propos recueillis par Jacqueline Sieger’,
Écrits politiques: 1957–1971
, pp. 156–61 (p. 161).
30.
Mireille Rosello, ‘The “Césaire Effect”: Or, How to Cultivate one’s Nation’,
Research in African Literatures
32.4 (2001): 77–91 (p. 81). On this question see also H. Adlai Murdoch, ‘
Ars poetica, ars politica:
The Double Life of Aimé Césaire’,
Research in African Literatures
41.1 (2010): 1–13.
31.
Thomas Hale and Kora Véron, ‘Is there unity in the writings of Aimé Césaire?’,
Research in African Literatures
41.1 (2010): 46–70.
32.
Cited from
L’Express
, 13 September 2001, in Thomas Hale and Kora Véron, ‘Is there unity in the writings of Aimé Césaire?’, p. 67.
33.
Euzhan Palcy,
Aimé Césaire, une parole pour le XXIème siècle
, 1994, 2006.
34.
See Condé’s comments in Euzhan Palcy’s documentary,
Aimé Césaire, une parole pour le XXIème siècle
, 1994, 2006.
35.
Fred Constant, ‘Aimé Césaire et la politique: Sept leçons de leadership’,
French Politics, Culture and Society
27.3 (2009): 34–43.
36.
Ann M. Simmons and Jaweed Kaleen, ‘Q&A: A founder of Black Lives Matter answers a question on many minds: where did it go?’,
Los Angeles Times
, 25 August 2017, quoted in Elvira Basevich,
W. E. B. Du Bois: The Lost and the Found
(Cambridge: Polity, 2021), p. 105.
11930s Paris and the Cahier d’un retour au pays natal‘It is beautiful and good and legitimate to be nègre’
In the 1935 article ‘Nègreries: Conscience raciale et révolution sociale’, where he first coins the term ‘négritude’, Césaire makes the following statement about the importance not just of political revolt but of black consciousness: ‘they therefore forgot the main thing, those who tell the black man that he should revolt without becoming conscious of himself, without telling him that it is beautiful and good and legitimate to be nègre’.1 The French term ‘nègre’ has a complex history, which will be discussed shortly, but which is distinct from corresponding English terms, so this term is retained here in my use of English translations in an effort to capture the meaning of Césaire’s powerful redeployment of this derogatory term. Césaire’s simple but hard-hitting affirmation is repeated in the Cahier
