Aimé Fernand David Césaire (26 June 1913 – 17 April 2008)




"Negritude" was coined by Césaire in his Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (1939) and it means, in his words, "the simple recognition of the fact that one is black, the acceptance of this fact and of our destiny as blacks, of our history and culture." Even in its beginnings Negritude was truly an international movement--drawing inspiration from the flowering of African-American culture brought about by the writers and thinkers of the Harlem Renaissance while asserting its place in the canon of French literature, glorifying the traditions of the African continent, and attracting participants in the colonized countries of the Caribbean, North Africa, and Latin America.

Anticolonialist

Mayor of Fort-de-France Martinique

Famous essay and quote: “Negro I Am, Negro I Will Remain”


Pan-Africanism

Discourse on Colonialism (published 1953)

Franz Fanon’s teacher and mentor

















My negritude is not a stone
    nor a deafness flung against the clamor of the day
    my negritude is not a white speck of dead water
    on the dead eye of the earth
    my negritude is neither tower nor cathedral

    it plunges into the red flesh of the soil
    it plunges into the blaxing flesh of the sky
    my negritude riddles with holes
    the dense affliction of its worthy patience.


Prospero, you are the master of illusion.
Lying is your trademark.
And you have lied so much to me
(lied about the world, lied about me)
that you have ended by imposing on me
an image of myself.
Underdeveloped, you brand me, inferior,
that's the way you have forced me to see myself.
I detest that image! What's more, it's a lie!
But now I know you, you old cancer,
and I know myself as well.




http://www.hommage-cesaire.net/