AIME CESAIRE
(b. June 26, 1913-d. April 17, 2008)
(b. June 26, 1913-d. April 17, 2008)
Aimé Césaire Centennial at the Schomburg
September 26, 2013
September 26, 2013
The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in NYC, in association with Columbia University and Medgar Evers College, will be holding a series of events to commemorate the life and work of Aimé Césaire at the centennial of his birth.
Aimé Césaire was a noted writer, scholar and political leader from Martinique, who is credited with coining the term Negritude. Césaire is known as the father of Negritude.
Negritude (which can be translated as "Blackness") was a Francophone African and Caribbean movement of the 1920s, '30s and '40s which stressed the importance of accepting and celebrating Blackness, and understanding Black history and culture.
Césaire wrote poems, plays and a biography of Toussaint L'Ouverture, hero of the Haitian Revolution.
Negritude was influenced by Langston Hughes and other writers of the Harlem Renaissance, most notably Claude McKay, another writer of Caribbean origin. Other members of the Negritude movement included Franz Fanon, Algerian author of Wretched of the Earth and Black Skin, White Masks.
Events include a screening of A Voice for History, a film by Euzhan Palcy; a live stage performance of Césaire's classic work Notebook of a Return to My Native Land [in English]; and a performance and discussion of Césaire's A Season in the Congo, which explores Patrice Lumumba's fight to free his country from Belgian colonial rule.
For details, see: Black History and Cultural Events.
http://blackartinamerica.com/profiles/blogs/aim-c-saire-centennial-at-the-schomburg
Aimé Césaire Centennial at the Schomburg
Posted by Zhana on September 30, 2013
The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in NYC, in association with Columbia University and Medgar Evers College, will be holding a series of events to commemorate the life and work of Aimé Césaire at the centennial of his birth.
Aimé Césaire was a noted writer, scholar and political leader from Martinique, who is credited with coining the term Negritude. Césaire is known as the father of Negritude.
Click here to read my blog on the Aimé Césaire Centennial.
Aimé Césaire Centennial at the Schomburg
Posted by Zhana on September 30, 2013
The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in NYC, in association with Columbia University and Medgar Evers College, will be holding a series of events to commemorate the life and work of Aimé Césaire at the centennial of his birth.
Aimé Césaire was a noted writer, scholar and political leader from Martinique, who is credited with coining the term Negritude. Césaire is known as the father of Negritude.
Click here to read my blog on the Aimé Césaire Centennial.
FROM THE PANOPTICON REVIEW ARCHIVES
(Originally posted on April 21, 2008):
Monday, April 21, 2008
Aimé Césaire: Revolutionary Poet, Critic, Playwright, and Activist, 1913-2008
(Originally posted on April 21, 2008):
Monday, April 21, 2008
Aimé Césaire: Revolutionary Poet, Critic, Playwright, and Activist, 1913-2008
"A civilization that proves incapable of solving the problems it creates is a decadent civilization. A civilization that chooses to close its eyes to its most crucial problems is a stricken civilization. A civilization that uses its principles for trickery and deceit is a dying civilization."
--Aime Cesaire, "Discourse on Colonialism" (1955)
for it is not true that the work of man
is finished
that man has nothing more to do in the
world but be a parasite in the world
that all we now need is to keep in step
with the world
but the work of man is only just beginning
and it remains to man to conquer all
the violence entrenched in the recesses
of his passion
and no race possesses the monopoly of beauty,
of intelligence, of force, and there
is a place for all at the rendezvous
of victory...
--From: "Notebook of a Return to My Native Land" (1939)
"Poetic knowledge is born in the great silence of scientific knowledge. Mankind, once bewildered by sheer facts, finally dominated them through reflection, observation, and experiment. Henceforth mankind knows how to make its way through the forest of phenomena. It knows how to utilize the world.
But it is not the lord of the world on that account.
A view of the world, yes; science affords a view of the world, but a summary and superficial view...in short, scientific knowledge enumerates, measures, classifies, and kills.
But it is not sufficient to state that scientific knowledge is summary. It is necessary to add that it is poor and half starved...To acquire the impersonality of scientific knowledge mankind depersonalized itself, deindividualized itself.
An impoverished knowledge, I submit, for at its inception--whatever other wealth it may have--there stands an impoverished humanity...
And mankind hs gradually become aware that side by side with this half-starved scientific knowledge there is another kind of knowledge. A fulfilling knowledge..
.
It was both desirable and inevitable that humanity should accede to greater precision.
It was both desirable and inevitable that humanity should experience nostalgia for greater feeling.
It is that mild autumnal nostalgia that threw mankind back from the clear light of scientific day to the nocturnal forces of poetry...
The poet is that very ancient yet new being, at once very complex and very simple, who at the limit of dream and reality, of day and night, between absence and presence, searches for and receives in the sudden triggering of inner cataclysms the password of connivance and power."
my Negritude is not a stone, its deafness a sounding board for the noises of the day
my Negritude is not a mere spot of dead water on the dead eye of the earth
my Negritude is neither tower nor cathedral
it takes root in the red flesh of the teeming earth
it takes root in the glowing flesh of the sky
it penetrates the seamless bondage of my unbending patience...
--Notebook of a Return to My Native Land (1939)
Aime Cesaire: "I would like to say that everyone has his own Negritude. There has been too much theorizing about Negritude. I have tried not to overdo it, out of a sense of modesty. but if someone asks me what my conception of Negritude is, I answer that above all it is a concrete rather than an abstract coming to consciousness....we must have a concrete consciousness of who we are--that is, of the first fact of our lives: that we are black; that we were black and have a history, a history that contains certain cultural elements of great value; and that Negroes were not, as you put it, born yesterday because there have been beautiful and important black civilizations. At the time we began to write people could write an entire history of world civilization without devoting a single chapter to Africa, as if Africa had made no contributions to the world. Therefore we affirmed that we were Negroes and that we were proud of it, and that we thought that Africa was not some sort of blank page in the history of humanity; in sum we asserted that our Negro heritage was worthy of respect, and that this heritage was not relegated to the past, that its values were values that could still make an important contribution to the world...
Our affinities were above all a matter of feeling. You either felt black or did not feel black. But there was also the political aspect. Negritude was, after all, part of the left. i never thought for a moment that our emancipation could come from the right--that's impossible. We both felt, [Leopold] Senghor and I, that our liberation placed us on the left, but both of us refused to see the black question as simply a social question. There are people, even today, who thought and still think that it is all simply a matter of the left taking power in France, that with a change in the economic conditions the black question will disappear. I have never agreed with that at all. I think the economic question is very important, but it is not the only thing..."
--Interview with Aime Cesaire conducted by Haitian poet and political activist Rene Depestre at the International Cultural Congress in Havana, Cuba, 1967
All,
ONE OF THE GREATEST, MOST IMPORTANT, AND INFLUENTIAL WRITERS, POETS, THINKERS, AND ACTIVISTS OF THE 20TH CENTURY HAS DIED.
Aimé Césaire is one of a small handful of the world's finest and most innovative poets of the past century as well as an extraordinary political and cultural theorist, revolutionary activist, political leader, playwright, and philosopher. Born in the French Caribbean colony of Martinique on June 26, 1913, Cesaire revolutionized both Western poetry and diasporic African literature and poetics during the course of a phenomenal six decade career and also played a major role in global anti-imperialist movements from the 1930s on as a radical political activist and communist. Upon leaving the Communist Party in 1956 Cesaire retained his revolutionary commitment to both an independent Marxism deeply informed and guided by his historical and social experience as a person of African descent and the bedrock principle of revolutionary socialism until his death on thursday, April 17 in his beloved city of Fort-De-France in Martinique. It was there that Cesaire sat as an esteemed member of the French parliament for over 50 years and was repeatedly elected mayor from 1945-2001. The magisterial author of many outstanding books of poetry, essays, cultural and literary criticism, and plays including such legendary and iconic texts as Notebook of a Return to My Native Land (1939) and Discourse on Colonialism (1955) Cesaire left a major impact on many aspects of world literature and philosophy such as surrealism and Negritude, as well as on radical political thought (especially in the 'Third World' of Africa, Asia, and Latin America). In addition he counted among his many students throughout the world his fellow Martinican legend Dr. Frantz Fanon (author of The Wretched of the Earth) who studied with Césaire in the 1940s and went on to practice psychiatry and become a major thinker and activist in the Algerian revolutionary war against French colonialism in the 1950s.
The following articles (see corresponding links below) are from orbituary, biographical, and historical essay sources dealing with Cesaire's incredible career and life. To say that this man was merely a "pioneer" or "highly unique individual" is completely inadequate and a gross understatement. Cesaire was one of the rare, seminal GIANTS of literature, philosophy, revolutionary politics, and cultural leadership on a global scale over the past century and his legacy will continue to resonate over many continents for decades to come. Rest in peace Aime. As your life and work always embodied so well: A Luta Continua! (The Struggle Continues!)
Kofi
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/18/books/18cesaire.html?_r=1&ref=arts&oref=slogin
http://www.lipmagazine.org/articles/featkelley_116.shtml
http://www2.presstelegram.com/news/ci_8966494
http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/04/17/europe/EU-GEN-France-Obit-Cesaire.php
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/04/17/news/obits.php
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5i2Rzl9sVEWSUq_AA7SAXQYAq10lgD903PMAO1
http://www.blacklooks.org/2008/04/aime_cesaire_1913_-_2008.html
http://www.lailalalami.com/blog/archives/005052.html
http://www.salon.com/wires/ap/world/2008/04/17/D903LM882_obit_cesaire/print.html
http://feeds.bignewsnetwork.com/?sid=349538
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aimé_Césaire
Aimé Césaire, Martinique Poet and Politician, Dies at 94
New York Times
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: April 18, 2008
FORT-DE-FRANCE, Martinique (AP) — Aimé Césaire, an anticolonialist poet and politician who was honored throughout the French-speaking world and who was an early proponent of black pride, died here on Thursday. He was 94.
A government spokeswoman, Marie Michèle Darsières, said he died at a hospital where he was being treated for heart problems and other ailments.
Mr. Césaire was one of the Caribbean’s most celebrated cultural figures. He was especially revered in his native Martinique, which sent him to the French parliament for nearly half a century and where he was repeatedly elected mayor of Fort-de-France, the capital city.
In Paris in the 1930s he helped found the journal Black Student, which gave birth to the idea of “negritude,” a call to blacks to cultivate pride in their heritage. His 1950 book “Discourse on Colonialism” was considered a classic of French political literature.
Mr. Césaire’s ideas were honored and his death mourned in Africa and France as well as the Caribbean. The office of President Nicolas Sarkozy of France said Mr. Sarkozy would attend Mr. Césaire’s funeral, scheduled for Sunday in Fort-de-France. Students at Lycée Scoelcher, a Martinique high school where Mr. Césaire once taught, honored him in a spontaneous ceremony Thursday.
Mr. Césaire’s best-known works included the essay “Negro I Am, Negro I Will Remain” and the poem “Notes From a Return to the Native Land.”
Born on June 26, 1913, in Basse-Pointe, Martinique, Mr. Césaire attended high school and college in France. In 1937 he married another student from Martinique, Suzanne Roussi, with whom he eventually had four sons and two daughters.
He returned to Martinique during World War II and was mayor of Fort-de-France from 1945 to 2001, except for a break from 1983 to 1984.
Mr. Césaire helped Martinique shed its colonial status in 1946 to become an overseas department of France.
He was affiliated with the French Communist Party early in his career but became disillusioned in the 1950s and founded the Martinique Progressive Party in 1958. He later allied with the Socialist Party in France’s National Assembly, where he served from 1946 to 1956 and from 1958 to 1993.
As the years passed, he remained firm in his views. In 2005 he refused to meet with Mr. Sarkozy, who was then minister of the interior, because of Mr. Sarkozy’s endorsement of a bill citing the “positive role” of colonialism.
“I remain faithful to my beliefs and remain inflexibly anticolonialist,” Mr. Césaire said at the time. The offending language was struck from the bill.
Despite the snub, Mr. Sarkozy last year successfully led a campaign to rename Martinique’s airport in honor of Mr. Césaire. Mr. Césaire eventually met with Mr. Sarkozy in March 2006 but endorsed his Socialist rival, Ségolène Royal, in the 2007 French elections.
--Aime Cesaire, "Discourse on Colonialism" (1955)
for it is not true that the work of man
is finished
that man has nothing more to do in the
world but be a parasite in the world
that all we now need is to keep in step
with the world
but the work of man is only just beginning
and it remains to man to conquer all
the violence entrenched in the recesses
of his passion
and no race possesses the monopoly of beauty,
of intelligence, of force, and there
is a place for all at the rendezvous
of victory...
--From: "Notebook of a Return to My Native Land" (1939)
"Poetic knowledge is born in the great silence of scientific knowledge. Mankind, once bewildered by sheer facts, finally dominated them through reflection, observation, and experiment. Henceforth mankind knows how to make its way through the forest of phenomena. It knows how to utilize the world.
But it is not the lord of the world on that account.
A view of the world, yes; science affords a view of the world, but a summary and superficial view...in short, scientific knowledge enumerates, measures, classifies, and kills.
But it is not sufficient to state that scientific knowledge is summary. It is necessary to add that it is poor and half starved...To acquire the impersonality of scientific knowledge mankind depersonalized itself, deindividualized itself.
An impoverished knowledge, I submit, for at its inception--whatever other wealth it may have--there stands an impoverished humanity...
And mankind hs gradually become aware that side by side with this half-starved scientific knowledge there is another kind of knowledge. A fulfilling knowledge..
.
It was both desirable and inevitable that humanity should accede to greater precision.
It was both desirable and inevitable that humanity should experience nostalgia for greater feeling.
It is that mild autumnal nostalgia that threw mankind back from the clear light of scientific day to the nocturnal forces of poetry...
The poet is that very ancient yet new being, at once very complex and very simple, who at the limit of dream and reality, of day and night, between absence and presence, searches for and receives in the sudden triggering of inner cataclysms the password of connivance and power."
--"Poetry and Knowledge" (1945)
my Negritude is not a stone, its deafness a sounding board for the noises of the day
my Negritude is not a mere spot of dead water on the dead eye of the earth
my Negritude is neither tower nor cathedral
it takes root in the red flesh of the teeming earth
it takes root in the glowing flesh of the sky
it penetrates the seamless bondage of my unbending patience...
--Notebook of a Return to My Native Land (1939)
Aime Cesaire: "I would like to say that everyone has his own Negritude. There has been too much theorizing about Negritude. I have tried not to overdo it, out of a sense of modesty. but if someone asks me what my conception of Negritude is, I answer that above all it is a concrete rather than an abstract coming to consciousness....we must have a concrete consciousness of who we are--that is, of the first fact of our lives: that we are black; that we were black and have a history, a history that contains certain cultural elements of great value; and that Negroes were not, as you put it, born yesterday because there have been beautiful and important black civilizations. At the time we began to write people could write an entire history of world civilization without devoting a single chapter to Africa, as if Africa had made no contributions to the world. Therefore we affirmed that we were Negroes and that we were proud of it, and that we thought that Africa was not some sort of blank page in the history of humanity; in sum we asserted that our Negro heritage was worthy of respect, and that this heritage was not relegated to the past, that its values were values that could still make an important contribution to the world...
Our affinities were above all a matter of feeling. You either felt black or did not feel black. But there was also the political aspect. Negritude was, after all, part of the left. i never thought for a moment that our emancipation could come from the right--that's impossible. We both felt, [Leopold] Senghor and I, that our liberation placed us on the left, but both of us refused to see the black question as simply a social question. There are people, even today, who thought and still think that it is all simply a matter of the left taking power in France, that with a change in the economic conditions the black question will disappear. I have never agreed with that at all. I think the economic question is very important, but it is not the only thing..."
--Interview with Aime Cesaire conducted by Haitian poet and political activist Rene Depestre at the International Cultural Congress in Havana, Cuba, 1967
All,
ONE OF THE GREATEST, MOST IMPORTANT, AND INFLUENTIAL WRITERS, POETS, THINKERS, AND ACTIVISTS OF THE 20TH CENTURY HAS DIED.
Aimé Césaire is one of a small handful of the world's finest and most innovative poets of the past century as well as an extraordinary political and cultural theorist, revolutionary activist, political leader, playwright, and philosopher. Born in the French Caribbean colony of Martinique on June 26, 1913, Cesaire revolutionized both Western poetry and diasporic African literature and poetics during the course of a phenomenal six decade career and also played a major role in global anti-imperialist movements from the 1930s on as a radical political activist and communist. Upon leaving the Communist Party in 1956 Cesaire retained his revolutionary commitment to both an independent Marxism deeply informed and guided by his historical and social experience as a person of African descent and the bedrock principle of revolutionary socialism until his death on thursday, April 17 in his beloved city of Fort-De-France in Martinique. It was there that Cesaire sat as an esteemed member of the French parliament for over 50 years and was repeatedly elected mayor from 1945-2001. The magisterial author of many outstanding books of poetry, essays, cultural and literary criticism, and plays including such legendary and iconic texts as Notebook of a Return to My Native Land (1939) and Discourse on Colonialism (1955) Cesaire left a major impact on many aspects of world literature and philosophy such as surrealism and Negritude, as well as on radical political thought (especially in the 'Third World' of Africa, Asia, and Latin America). In addition he counted among his many students throughout the world his fellow Martinican legend Dr. Frantz Fanon (author of The Wretched of the Earth) who studied with Césaire in the 1940s and went on to practice psychiatry and become a major thinker and activist in the Algerian revolutionary war against French colonialism in the 1950s.
The following articles (see corresponding links below) are from orbituary, biographical, and historical essay sources dealing with Cesaire's incredible career and life. To say that this man was merely a "pioneer" or "highly unique individual" is completely inadequate and a gross understatement. Cesaire was one of the rare, seminal GIANTS of literature, philosophy, revolutionary politics, and cultural leadership on a global scale over the past century and his legacy will continue to resonate over many continents for decades to come. Rest in peace Aime. As your life and work always embodied so well: A Luta Continua! (The Struggle Continues!)
Kofi
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/18/books/18cesaire.html?_r=1&ref=arts&oref=slogin
http://www.lipmagazine.org/articles/featkelley_116.shtml
http://www2.presstelegram.com/news/ci_8966494
http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/04/17/europe/EU-GEN-France-Obit-Cesaire.php
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/04/17/news/obits.php
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5i2Rzl9sVEWSUq_AA7SAXQYAq10lgD903PMAO1
http://www.blacklooks.org/2008/04/aime_cesaire_1913_-_2008.html
http://www.lailalalami.com/blog/archives/005052.html
http://www.salon.com/wires/ap/world/2008/04/17/D903LM882_obit_cesaire/print.html
http://feeds.bignewsnetwork.com/?sid=349538
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aimé_Césaire
Aimé Césaire, Martinique Poet and Politician, Dies at 94
New York Times
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: April 18, 2008
FORT-DE-FRANCE, Martinique (AP) — Aimé Césaire, an anticolonialist poet and politician who was honored throughout the French-speaking world and who was an early proponent of black pride, died here on Thursday. He was 94.
A government spokeswoman, Marie Michèle Darsières, said he died at a hospital where he was being treated for heart problems and other ailments.
Mr. Césaire was one of the Caribbean’s most celebrated cultural figures. He was especially revered in his native Martinique, which sent him to the French parliament for nearly half a century and where he was repeatedly elected mayor of Fort-de-France, the capital city.
In Paris in the 1930s he helped found the journal Black Student, which gave birth to the idea of “negritude,” a call to blacks to cultivate pride in their heritage. His 1950 book “Discourse on Colonialism” was considered a classic of French political literature.
Mr. Césaire’s ideas were honored and his death mourned in Africa and France as well as the Caribbean. The office of President Nicolas Sarkozy of France said Mr. Sarkozy would attend Mr. Césaire’s funeral, scheduled for Sunday in Fort-de-France. Students at Lycée Scoelcher, a Martinique high school where Mr. Césaire once taught, honored him in a spontaneous ceremony Thursday.
Mr. Césaire’s best-known works included the essay “Negro I Am, Negro I Will Remain” and the poem “Notes From a Return to the Native Land.”
Born on June 26, 1913, in Basse-Pointe, Martinique, Mr. Césaire attended high school and college in France. In 1937 he married another student from Martinique, Suzanne Roussi, with whom he eventually had four sons and two daughters.
He returned to Martinique during World War II and was mayor of Fort-de-France from 1945 to 2001, except for a break from 1983 to 1984.
Mr. Césaire helped Martinique shed its colonial status in 1946 to become an overseas department of France.
He was affiliated with the French Communist Party early in his career but became disillusioned in the 1950s and founded the Martinique Progressive Party in 1958. He later allied with the Socialist Party in France’s National Assembly, where he served from 1946 to 1956 and from 1958 to 1993.
As the years passed, he remained firm in his views. In 2005 he refused to meet with Mr. Sarkozy, who was then minister of the interior, because of Mr. Sarkozy’s endorsement of a bill citing the “positive role” of colonialism.
“I remain faithful to my beliefs and remain inflexibly anticolonialist,” Mr. Césaire said at the time. The offending language was struck from the bill.
Despite the snub, Mr. Sarkozy last year successfully led a campaign to rename Martinique’s airport in honor of Mr. Césaire. Mr. Césaire eventually met with Mr. Sarkozy in March 2006 but endorsed his Socialist rival, Ségolène Royal, in the 2007 French elections.
This article adapted in part from an article which originally appeared in Monthly Review.
Poetry & The Political Imagination: Aime Cesaire, Negritude, and the Applications of Surrealism
by Robin D. G. Kelley
July 9, 2001
Aime Cesaire demolishes the maxim that poets make terrible politicians. Known in the world of letters as the progenitor of Negritude (the first diasporic "black pride" movement), a major voice of Surrealism, and one of the great French poets, Césaire is also revered for his role in modern anticolonial and Pan-African movements. While it might appear that the poet and politician operated in separate spheres, Césaire's life and work demonstrate that poetry can be the motor of political imagination, a potent weapon in any movement that claims freedom as its primary goal.
Born on June 25, 1913, in the small town of Basse-Pointe, Martinique, Césaire and his five siblings were raised by their mother, who was a dressmaker, and their father, who held a post as the local tax inspector. Although their father was well-educated and they shared the cultural sensibilities of the petite bourgeoisie, the Césaires nonetheless lived close to the edge of rural poverty. Aimé turned out to be a brilliant, precocious student and at age 11 was admitted to the Lycée Schoelcher in Fort-de-France. Upon graduation in 1931, he moved to Paris and enrolled in the Lycée Louis-le-Grand to prepare for the grueling entrance exams to the École Normale Supérieure (a high-level teachers' training college). There he met a number of like-minded intellectuals, most notably the Senegalese intellectual Léopold Sédar Senghor. Among other things, they began to study African history and culture, particularly the writings of German ethnologist Leo Frobenius, whose The Voice of Africa provided a powerful defense of Africa's cultural and intellectual contributions to the world.
The twosome, along with Césaire's childhood friend, poet Léon-Gontran Damas, launched a journal called L'Étudiant Noir (The Black Student). In its March 1935 issue, Césaire published a passionate tract against assimilation in which he first coined the term "Negritude." It is more than ironic that at the moment Césaire's piece appeared, he was hard at work absorbing as much knowledge about French and European humanities as possible in preparation for his entrance exams for École Normale Supérieure. The exams took their toll, for sure, though the psychic and emotional costs of having to imbibe the very culture Césaire publicly rejected must have exacerbated an already exhausting regimen.
After completing his exams during the summer of 1935, he took a short vacation to Yugoslavia with a fellow student. While visiting the Adriatic coast, Césaire was overcome with memories of home after seeing a small island from a distance. Moved, he stayed up half the night working on a long poem about the Martinique of his youth—the land, the people, the majesty of the place. The next morning when he inquired about the little island, he was told it was called Martinska. A magical chance encounter, to say the least; the words he penned that moonlit night were the beginnings of what would subsequently become his most famous poem of all: "Cahier d'un Retour au Pays Natal (Notebook of a Return to My Native Land)".
He did subsequently return to his native land in the early 1940s, shortly after "Cahier" was published, and he was joined by his wife Suzanne Roussy, a fellow Martinican student with whom he had worked on L'Étudiant Noir. They both took teaching posts in Fort-de-France and, along with other intellectuals such as René Ménil, Lucie Thésée, and Aristide Maugée, launched a journal called Tropiques in 1941. Its appearance coincided with the fall of France to the fascist Vichy regime, which consequently put the colonies of Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Guiana under Vichy rule and shattered any illusions Césaire and his comrades might have harbored about color-blind French brotherhood. The racism and authoritarianism of the regime was blatant and direct. Vichy officials censored and interdicted all literature they deemed subversive, thus forcing Tropiques's editors to camouflage their publication as a journal of West Indian folklore. Yet, despite the repressions and the ruses, Tropiques survived the war as a major voice for Surrealism and a critical forum for the evolution of a sophisticated anticolonial stance as well as a vision of a postcolonial future. The Césaires and their fellow editors promoted a vision of freedom that drew on modernism and a deep appreciation for precolonial African modes of thought and practice, and produced a kind of merging of Negritude, Marxism, and Surrealism.
By the end of the war, Césaire became more directly involved in politics, joining the Communist Party and successfully running for mayor of Fort-de-France and deputy to the French National Assembly under the Communist ticket. His main concern, however, was not proletarian revolution but rather the colonial question. In 1946, he succeeded in getting the National Assembly to pass a law changing the status of Martinique, Guadeloupe, Guiana, and Réunion from colonies to "departments" within the French Republic. He believed that the assimilation of the old colonies into the republic would guarantee equal rights, but this turned out not to be the case. In the end, French officials were sent to the colonies in greater numbers, often displacing some of the local black Martinican bureaucrats. It was a painful lesson for Césaire, one that powerfully molded his first and perhaps most important nonfiction book, Discourse on Colonialism.
First published in 1950, Discourse on Colonialism is indisputably one of the key contributions to a wave of anticolonial literature produced during the postwar period. As with much of the radical literature produced during this epoch, Discourse places the colonial question front and center. In fine Hegelian fashion, Césaire argues that colonialism works to "decivilize" the colonizer: Torture, violence, race hatred, and immorality constitute a dead weight on the so-called civilized, pulling the master class deeper and deeper into the abyss of barbarism. The instruments of colonial power rely on barbaric, brutal violence and intimidation, and the end result is the degradation of Europe itself. Discourse, then, has a double-edged meaning: It is Césaire's discourse on the material and spiritual havoc created by colonialism, and it is also a critique of colonial discourse.
Anticipating the explosion of work we now call "postcolonial studies," Césaire reveals how the circulation of colonial ideology—an ideology of racial and cultural hierarchy—is as essential to colonial rule as the police and the use of forced labor. Furthermore, as a product of the post-World War II period, Discourse goes one step further by drawing a direct link between the logic of colonialism and the rise of fascism. He provocatively points out that Europeans tolerated "Nazism before it was inflicted on them...because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples; that they have cultivated that Nazism, that they are responsible for it, and that before engulfing the whole of Western, Christian civilization in its reddened waters, it oozes, seeps, and trickles from every crack."
The political implications for Césaire were that colonialism had to be overthrown and a new culture had to replace it, one that embraced non-Western traditions while also embracing the best that modernity had to offer. He outlined this argument in a paper titled "Culture and Colonization," delivered at the First International Congress of Negro Writers and Artists in September 1956. Ultimately, Césaire's insistence that colonialism and racism were the fundamental problems facing the modern world could not be reconciled with the Communist position that promoting proletarian revolution should take precedence over all other struggles. One month later, Césaire penned his famous "Letter to Maurice Thorez, Secretary General of the French Communist Party," tendering his resignation from the party. Arguing that people of color need to exercise self-determination, he warned against treating the "colonial question...as a subsidiary part of some more important global matter." Racism, in other words, cannot be subordinate to the class struggle. If following the Communist Party "pillages our most vivifying friendships, wastes the bond that weds us to other West Indian islands, the tie that makes us Africa's child, then I say communism has served us ill in having us swap a living brotherhood for what looks to have the features of the coldest of all chill abstractions."
Césaire, like his former student Frantz Fanon, was now convinced that only Third World revolt could pave the way for a new society. He had practically given up on Europe and the old humanism and its claims of universality, opting instead to redefine the "universal" in a way that did not privilege Europe. "I have a different idea of a universal," Césaire explained to his former Communist comrades. "It is of a universal rich with all that is particular, rich with all the particulars there are, the deepening of each particular, the coexistence of them all."
Césaire went on to found the Martinican Progressive Party and serve as mayor of Fort-de-France for the next two-and-a-half decades, and he continued to write. In 1960, he published Ferrements, a collection of 48 poems about black liberation and new possibilities created by independence. Using the metaphor of transforming slavery's chains into metal armor, Césaire saw the future of Africa and the diaspora as a phoenix rising. A year later he released Cadastre, which included previous poems from Soleil cou Coupé and Corps Perdu. Whereas Africa was rising (with the exception of places still under white minority rule), Europe here is depicted as a land of petrifaction and rot.
The themes of colonialism and postcolonialism dominated Césaire's work during the 1960s, so much so that he increasingly turned to history in order to explore the problems and prospects of anticolonial revolution. In 1961, he published his second major work of nonfiction: Toussaint L'Ouverture: La Révolution Française et le Problème Colonial (Toussaint L'Ouverture: The French Revolution and the Problem of Colonialism). Césaire tried to show that the French Revolution failed as much as the Haitian Revolution to achieve true liberty. Toussaint not only wanted to destroy slavery on the island of Saint Domingue but wanted to turn these ex-slaves into efficient producers for a world market, to bring his country into the modern world as citizens of the French empire. While the revolution successfully fulfilled the first goal, his dream of a modern Haiti joining a French commonwealth as equal partners was an abysmal failure. That dream died with him in a cold jail cell in Napoleon's France.
Unlike other critics, Césaire argued that Toussaint's failure lay not so much in his ambition or his ideas as in his overreliance on the military to solve social, political, and economic problems. His critique of Toussaint carried with it a veiled critique of military dictators emerging in postcolonial Africa and Latin America—a critique made explicit in his 1963 play, La Tragedie du Roi Christophe (The Tragedy of King Christophe). While grounded in Césaire's reading of Haitian history, it was also a critique of François Duvalier, Haiti's ruler from 1957 through 1971. It explores the many dimensions of postcolonial corruption, depicting Christophe as a deeply flawed but well-meaning tyrant exploiting the black masses trapped on the island. Césaire's next play, Un Saison au Congo (A Season in the Congo) (1965), about Patrice Lumumba and the struggle for independence in the Congo, went one step further, suggesting that only revolution and the violent overthrow of these dictatorships could bring about any real change.
In his final exploration of colonialism, Césaire retreated from modern history and turned to Shakespeare as his vehicle. His 1969 adaptation of The Tempest (Une Tempête) explored the relationship between Prospero the colonizer and his colonial subjects, Caliban and Ariel. Caliban rebels outright, whereas Ariel attempts to appeal to Prospero's moral conscience. Caliban is eventually crushed when he attempts to become his own master, but not before figuring out that Prospero's domination and claims to superiority are based on lies. Caliban's final speech could have come straight from Césaire's mouth, or the mouths of the radical black intelligentsia produced by colonial education:
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.
During the course of the next three decades, Césaire continued to write but moved away from the epic hero and the problems of the colonial encounter. The Surrealism that had always undergirded his work resurfaced more explicitly in his 1976 collection Noria as well as his last play, Moi, Laminaire (1982), both of which explored language and reveled in the ambiguous, dreamlike characteristics of the unconscious.
The weapon of poetry may be Césaire's greatest gift to a modern world still searching for freedom. As one of the last truly great "universalists" of the 20th century, he has had a hand in shaping or critiquing many of the major ideologies and movements of the modern world—Marxism, nationalism, Pan-Africanism, and fascism, among others. All of these ideas are rooted in notions of progress, all are products of modernity, and all fall short when it comes to envisioning a genuinely emancipatory future. Césaire must have known this, which is why more than half a century ago he wrote: "Poetic knowledge is born in the great silence of scientific knowledge."
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FORT-DE-FRANCE, Martinique - Aime Cesaire, an anti-colonialist poet and politician who was honored throughout the French-speaking world and was an early proponent of black pride, has died at 94.
Cesaire died Thursday at a Fort-de-France hospital where he was being treated for heart problems and other ailments, said government spokeswoman Marie Michele Darsieres.
He was one of the Caribbean's most celebrated cultural figures and was revered in his native Martinique, where his passing brought tears and spontaneous memorial observances.
The French island sent him to the country's parliament for nearly half a century and repeatedly elected him mayor of the capital.
Cesaire helped found the "Black Student" journal in Paris in the 1930s that launched the idea of "negritude," urging blacks to cultivate pride in their heritage. His 1950 "Discourse on Colonialism" became a classic of French political literature.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy expressed "very great sadness" at Cesaire's passing, and said "the entire French nation" is in mourning.
"I prayed for him," said 45-year-old teacher Jean Luc Martin, his eyes red from crying. "I studied his works, which forged my life and allowed me to see our differences in a new light."
Students at Lycee Scoelcher, a Martinique high school where Cesaire once taught, honored him in a spontaneous ceremony Thursday. "For us, only two men count: Aime Cesaire and Nelson Mandela," student Karl Dintimile said.
Cesaire's best known works included the essay "Negro I am, Negro I Will Remain" and the poem "Notes From a Return to the Native Land."
Former Senegalese President Abdou Diouf said Cesaire led a noble fight against hate.
Born June 26, 1913, in Basse-Pointe, Martinique, Cesaire moved to France for high school and university. He returned to Martinique during World War II and served as mayor from 1945 to 2001, except in 1983-84.
Cesaire helped Martinique shed its colonial status in 1946 to become an overseas department.
In 2005, the politician-poet refused to meet with then-Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, now French president, because of his endorsement of a bill citing the "positive role" of colonialism.
The offending language was struck from the bill.
Cesaire eventually met with Sarkozy in March 2006 but endorsed his Socialist rival, Segolene Royal, in the 2007 French elections.
Royal called Cesaire "an eminent symbol of a mixed-race France" and urged that he be buried in the Pantheon, where French heroes such as Victor Hugo to Marie and Pierre Curie are interred.
Cesaire was affiliated with the French Communist Party early in his career but became disillusioned in the 1950s and founded the Martinique Progressive Party in 1958. He later allied with the Socialist Party.
OBITUARY
Aimé Césaire, Martinique poet, has died
The Associated Press
Published: April 17, 2008
PARIS: The esteemed Martinique poet and politician Aimé Césaire, a leading figure in the movement for black consciousness, died Thursday, the French president's office and a hospital said. He was 94.
Césaire died in Fort-de-France on the French Caribbean island of Martinique, the hospital that was treating him said.
Césaire was involved in the fight for French West Indian rights, and he also served as a lawmaker in the lower house of France's parliament for nearly 50 years. French President Nicolas Sarkozy successfully led a campaign last year to change the name of Martinique's airport in honor of Césaire.
Sarkozy on Thursday praised Césaire as "a great poet" and a "great humanist."
"As a free and independent spirit, throughout his whole life he embodied the fight for the recognition of his identity and the richness of his African roots," Sarkozy said. "Through his universal call for the respect of human dignity, consciousness and responsibility, he will remain a symbol of hope for all oppressed peoples."
Césaire's 1950 "Discourse on Colonialism" has become a classic of French political literature and helped develop the concept of negritude, which urges blacks to cultivate pride in their heritage.
Born June 26, 1913, in Basse-Pointe, Martinique, Césaire moved to mainland France for high school and university studies, and finished one of the country's most elite institutes, the Ecole Normale Superieure.
He and Senegal's Leopold Sedar Senghor founded the journal "Black Student" in the 1930s, which gave birth to the idea of negritude.
Césaire returned to Martinique during World War II and taught at a high school in Fort-de-France.
Césaire served as mayor of Fort-de-France from 1945 to his retirement in 2001, except for a blip in 1983-84.
"I accomplished the work I had to do," Césaire said in his surprise announcement in 2000 that that he wouldn't seek another mayoral term.
Césaire's essays included "Negro I am, Negro I Will Remain." His poems, written in French, included "Notes From a Return to the Native Land." He also wrote plays.
OBITUARY
Aimé Césaire, 94, poet and human rights leader
The Associated Press
April 17, 2008
FORT-DE-FRANCE, Martinique: Aimé Césaire, a poet honored throughout the Francophone world and a crusader for West Indian rights, has died at 94.
Césaire died Thursday at a Fort-de-France hospital where he was being treated for heart problems and other ailments, a government spokeswoman, Marie-Michèle Darsières, said.
He was one of the most celebrated cultural figures in the Caribbean and was revered in his native Martinique, which sent him to the French Parliament for nearly half a century and repeatedly elected him mayor of the capital.
Césaire helped found the journal L'Étudiant Noir in Paris in the 1930s that launched the idea of "Négritude," urging blacks to cultivate pride in their heritage. His 1950 "Discourse on Colonialism" became a classic of French political literature.
His best-known works included the essay "Negro I Am, Negro I Will Remain" and the poem "Notes From a Return to the Native Land."
Cesaire died Thursday, April 17, 2008 in the French Caribbean island of Martinique. He was 94. Cesaire was a fixture in France's parliament for nearly half a century and a key figure in the fight for French Caribbean rights.
Martinique poet Aime Cesaire dies at age 94
By HERVE BRIVAL
FORT-DE-FRANCE, Martinique (AP) — Aime Cesaire, a poet honored throughout the French-speaking world and a crusader for West Indian rights, has died at 94.
Cesaire died Thursday after at a Fort-de-France hospital where he was being treated for heart problems and other ailments, said government spokeswoman Marie Michele Darsieres.
He was one of the most celebrated cultural figures in the Caribbean and was revered in his native Martinique, which sent him to France's parliament for nearly half a century and repeatedly elected him mayor of the capital.
Cesaire helped found the "Black Student" journal in Paris in the 1930s that launched the idea of "negritude," urging blacks to cultivate pride in their heritage. His 1950 "Discourse on Colonialism" became a classic of French political literature.
French Culture Minister Christine Albanel said Cesaire "imbued the French language with his liberty and his revolt."
"He made (the French language) beat to the rhythm of his spells, his cries, his appeals to overcome oppression, invoking the soul of subjugated peoples to urge the living to raise themselves up," she said.
His best known works included the essay "Negro I am, Negro I Will Remain" and the poem "Notes From a Return to the Native Land."
Cesaire was born June 26, 1913, in Basse-Pointe, Martinique and moved to France for high school and university studies. He graduated from one of the country's most elite institutes, the Ecole Normale Superieure.
Cesaire returned to Martinique during World War II and taught at a high school in Fort-de-France, where he served as mayor from 1945 to 2001, except for a blip in 1983-84.
Even political rivals paid him homage.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy successfully led a campaign last year to change the name of Martinique's airport in honor of Cesaire, despite the poet's refusal to meet him two years earlier.
Cesaire complained that Sarkozy had endorsed a 2005 French bill citing the "positive role" of colonialism. Cesaire spoke ardently against the measure's language, and it was later removed after complaints from former French colonies and France's overseas territories.
"I remain faithful to my beliefs and remain inflexibly anti-colonialist," Cesaire said in a statement at the time.
Cesaire eventually met with Sarkozy in March 2006 but endorsed his Socialist rival, Segolene Royal, in the 2007 French elections. Sarkozy on Thursday praised Cesaire as "a great poet" and a "great humanist." "As a free and independent spirit, throughout his whole life he embodied the fight for the recognition of his identity and the richness of his African roots," Sarkozy said. "Through his universal call for the respect of human dignity, consciousness and responsibility, he will remain a symbol of hope for all oppressed peoples."
Royal called him "an eminent symbol of a mixed-race France" and urged that he be buried in the Pantheon, where French heroes from Victor Hugo to Marie and Pierre Curie are interred.
"A great voice has died out, that of a man of conviction, of creation, of testimony, who awakened consciousness throughout his life, blasted apart hypocrisies, brought hope to all who were humiliated, and was a tireless fighter for human dignity," Royal said.
Cesaire was the honorary president of her support committee during the presidential campaign. Cesaire was affiliated with the French Communist Party early in his career but became disillusioned in the 1950s and founded the Martinique Progressive Party in 1958. He later allied with the Socialist Party in France's National Assembly, where he served from 1946-1956 and 1958-1993.
Associated Press writer Angela Doland in Paris, France, contributed to this report.
Copyright © 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
Aime Cesaire: 1913 - 2008
on April 17, 2008
Category: African Diaspora, African History, Obituary
The Martiniquan poet, novelist, playwright and activist, Aime Cesaire died today aged 94. I feel sad that the last of our literary and ideological [negritude] warriors is now gone.
Sad that we people of African descent remain at odds with each other. Where the people who stayed behind have forgotten those who were stolen from their villages and towns. We stand before each other staring at myths and lies constructed not by us, but by those who wish to divide us. But still we believe not what we see but what we are told.
My friend Marian who has also written a tribute in English and French sent me this from a friend of a Martiniquan friend of hers in DC.
Dear Colleagues:
The following is to announce the passing of Aime Cesaire. A poet, playwright, writer, Mayor of Fort-de-France, Congressman, pillar of the Negritude movement, thinker of the African independence movements, Cesaire leaves us with a long legacy of struggle for the dignity of people of African descent around the world, for human rights. As heads of state and dignitaries especially from Africa and the Caribbean are making their way to Martinique to attend his funeral on Sunday, we cannot help but think of the number of people he has influenced world wide through his writings. Cesaire is taught in the majority of the French language departments in universities across the United States and around the world. Among his works “Discourse on Colonialism”, “A Season in the Congo”, “The tragedy of King Christopher” or “Return to My Native Land” have resonated in the 1960s and beyond and have been seminal to liberation struggles around the globe.
Today I also mourn the personal friend and mentor that I visited on every trip to Martinique. I will miss his guidance, strength of character and dignity shrouded in simplicity.
Our thoughts and prayers are with his family.
Your colleague, Marilyn Sephocle
Aime Cesaire
Martinique
APRIL 17, 2008
R.I.P Aimé Césaire
I just heard news that the Martinican man of letters Aimé Césaire, who authored the classic Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, who inspired such different people as Frantz Fanon and Leopold Sedar Senghor, and who created the undeniably influential but now occasionally derided concept of négritude, has passed away in Fort-de-France. He was 94.
French president Nicolas Sarkozy is due to attend the funeral on Sunday. I wonder if his speech will bear any similarities to the the one he gave in Dakar last summer.
posted by Laila Lalami at 03:16 PM
Martinique poet Aime Cesaire dies at 94
By HERVE BRIVAL Associated Press Writer
Apr 17th, 2008 | FORT-DE-FRANCE, Martinique -- Aime Cesaire, an anti-colonialist poet and politician who was honored throughout the French-speaking world and was an early proponent of black pride, has died at 94.
Cesaire died Thursday at a Fort-de-France hospital where he was being treated for heart problems and other ailments, said government spokeswoman Marie Michele Darsieres.
He was one of the Caribbean's most celebrated cultural figures and was revered in his native Martinique, where his passing brought tears and spontaneous memorial observances.
The French island sent him to the country's parliament for nearly half a century and repeatedly elected him mayor of the capital.
Cesaire helped found the "Black Student" journal in Paris in the 1930s that launched the idea of "negritude," urging blacks to cultivate pride in their heritage. His 1950 "Discourse on Colonialism" became a classic of French political literature.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy expressed "very great sadness" at Cesaire's passing, and said "the entire French nation" is in mourning.
"Through his universal appeal for respect of human dignity, awareness and responsibility, he will remain a symbol of hope for all oppressed peoples," the president said a statement. Sarkozy's office said he would attend Cesaire's funeral Sunday in Fort-de-France.
Martinicans mourned Cesaire's passing.
"I prayed for him," said 45-year-old teacher Jean Luc Martin, his eyes red from crying. "I studied his works, which forged my life and allowed me to see our differences in a new light."
Students at Lycee Scoelcher, a Martinique high school where Cesaire once taught, honored him in a spontaneous ceremony Thursday. "For us, only two men count: Aime Cesaire and Nelson Mandela," student Karl Dintimile said.
Cesaire's best known works included the essay "Negro I am, Negro I Will Remain" and the poem "Notes From a Return to the Native Land."
His works also resonated in Africa. Former Senegalese President Abdou Diouf said Cesaire led a noble fight against hate.
"I salute the memory of a man who dedicated his life to multiple wars waged on all battlefields for the political and cultural destiny of his racial brothers," Diouf said.
Born June 26, 1913, in Basse-Pointe, Martinique, Cesaire moved to France for high school and university. He returned to Martinique during World War II and served as mayor from 1945 to 2001, except in 1983-84.
Cesaire helped Martinique shed its colonial status in 1946 to become an overseas department. As the years passed, he remained firm in his views.
In 2005, the politician-poet refused to meet with then-Interior Minister Sarkozy because of his endorsement of a bill citing the "positive role" of colonialism.
"I remain faithful to my beliefs and remain inflexibly anti-colonialist," Cesaire said at the time. The offending language was struck from the bill.
Despite the snub, Sarkozy successfully led a campaign last year to change the name of Martinique's airport in honor of Cesaire. Cesaire eventually met with Sarkozy in March 2006 but endorsed his Socialist rival, Segolene Royal, in the 2007 French elections.
Royal called Cesaire "an eminent symbol of a mixed-race France" and urged that he be buried in the Pantheon, where French heroes from Victor Hugo to Marie and Pierre Curie are interred.
Cesaire was affiliated with the French Communist Party early in his career but became disillusioned in the 1950s and founded the Martinique Progressive Party in 1958. He later allied with the Socialist Party in France's National Assembly, where he served from 1946-1956 and 1958-1993.
———
Associated Press writer Angela Doland in Paris contributed to this report.
Salon provides breaking news articles from the Associated Press as a service to its readers, but does not edit the AP articles it publishes.
Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Monday 21st April, 2008
French poet, politician Aime Cesaire dies
IANS Thursday 17th April, 2008
Prominent French poet and anti-colonialist politician Aime Cesaire has died at the age of 94, French media reported Thursday.
Cesaire passed away in a hospital in Fort-de-France, the capital of the Antilles island of Martinique, after a brief illness.
Born in Basse-Pointe, Martinique, Cesaire travelled to Paris as a young man and there studied at the Ecole Normale Superieure.
In Paris, he created, with Leopold Sedar Senghor and Leon Damas, the literary review 'L'Etudiant Noir' (The Black Student), which marked the beginning of the so-called Negritude movement.
Negritude was a forerunner of the Black Power movement of the 1960s, emphasizing awareness of black heritage, values, and culture, and was used to rally decolonized Africans in the 1950s.
Cesaire moved back to Martinique in 1939 with his wife, fellow Martinican student Suzanne Roussi, and their young son.
He became a teacher at the Lycee Schoelcher in Fort-de-France, where one of his students was Frantz Fanon, who would become a prominent anti-colonialist polemicist and writer.
Cesaire represented Martinique in the French National Assembly from 1946, was mayor of Fort-de-France from 1945 to 1983, and became president of the Martinique Regional Council in 1983.
Originally a Communist, he opposed the Soviet Union's invasion of Hungary in 1956 and left the party to form the Martinique Progressive Party (PPM), which advocated autonomy for the island.
His works include the play 'The Tragedy of King Christophe' (1963) and the poem 'Notebook of a Return to my Native Land' (1939), as well as an adaptation for black theatre of Shakespeare's 'The Tempest'.
In 1983, the University of California Press brought out an edition of his collected poems.
Martinique's airport at Le Lamentin was renamed Martinique Aime Cesaire International Airport Jan 15, 2007.
Aimé Césaire was born in Basse-Pointe, Martinique. In 1931, he traveled to Paris to attend the Lycée Louis-le-Grand on an educational scholarship. In Paris, Césaire, who in 1935 passed an entrance exam for the École normale supérieure, created, with Léopold Sédar Senghor and Léon Damas, the literary review L'Étudiant Noir (The Black Student) which was a forerunner of the Négritude movement. In 1936, Césaire began work on his book-length poem Cahier d'un retour au pays natal - Notebook of a Return to My Native Land - (1939), a vivid and powerful depiction of the ambiguities of Caribbean life and culture in the New World and this upon returning home to Martinique.
Césaire married fellow Martinican student Suzanne Roussi in 1937. Together they moved back to Martinique in 1939 with their young son. Césaire became a teacher at the Lycée Schoelcher in Fort-de-France, where he taught Frantz Fanon and served as an inspiration for, but did not teach, Édouard Glissant. He would become a heavy influence for Fanon as both a mentor and a contemporary throughout Fanon's short life.
The years of World War II were ones of great intellectual activity for the Césaires. In 1941, Aimé Césaire and Suzanne Roussi founded the literary review Tropiques, with the help of other Martinican intellectuals like René Ménil and Aristide Maugée, in order to challenge the cultural status quo and alienation that then characterized Martinican identity. Many run-ins with censorship did not deter Césaire from being an outspoken defendant of Martinican identity. He also became close to French surrealist poet André Breton, who spent time in Martinique during the war. Breton contributed a laudatory introduction to the 1947 edition of Cahier d'un retour au pays natal, saying that "this poem is nothing less than the greatest lyrical monument of our times." ("ce poème [n'est] rien moins que le plus grand monument lyrique de ce temps").
In 1945, with the support of the French Communist Party, Césaire was elected mayor of Fort-de-France and député to the French National Assembly for Martinique. He was one of the principal drafters of the 1946 law on departmentalizing former colonies, a role for which independentist politicians have often criticized him.
Like many left intellectuals in France, Césaire looked in the 1930s and 1940s toward the Soviet Union as a source of human progress, virtue, and human rights, but Césaire later grew disillusioned with Communism. In 1956, after the invasion of Hungary by the Soviet Union, Aimé Césaire announced his resignation from the French Communist Party in a text entitled Lettre à Maurice Thorez. In 1958 he founded the Parti Progressiste Martiniquais. In 1960, he published Toussaint Louverture, based upon the life of the Haitian revolutionary. He served as President of the Regional Council of Martinique from 1983 to 1988. He retired from politics in 2001.
In 2006, he refused to meet the leader of the Union for a Popular Movement (UMP), Nicolas Sarkozy, then a probable contender for the 2007 presidential election, because the UMP had voted for the February 23, 2005 law asking teachers and textbooks to "acknowledge and recognize in particular the positive role of the French presence abroad, especially in North Africa", a law considered by many as a eulogy to colonialism and French actions during the Algerian War. President Jacques Chirac finally had the controversial law repealed[1].
His writings reflect his passion for civic and social engagement. He is the author of Discours sur le colonialisme (Discourse on Colonialism) (1953), a denunciation of European colonial racism which was published in the French review Présence Africaine. In 1968, he published the first version of Une Tempête, a radical adaptation of Shakespeare's play The Tempest for a black audience.
Martinique's airport at Le Lamentin was renamed Martinique Aimé Césaire International Airport on January 15, 2007.
From April 9, 2008, he had serious heart troubles and was admitted to Pierre Zobda Quitman hospital in Fort-de-France. He died on April 17, 2008.[1]
Works
Poetry
Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (1939), Return to my native land (bilingual edition), Paris: Présence Africaine 1968
Armes miraculeuses (1946)
Soleil cou coupé (1948)
Corps perdu (1950)
Ferrements (1960)
Cadastre (1961)
Moi, laminaire (1982)
Collected Poetry, University of California Press (1983)
Theater
Et les Chiens se taisaient, tragédie: arrangement théâtral. Paris: Présence Africaine, 1958, 1997.
La Tragédie du roi Christophe. Paris: Présence Africaine, 1963, 1993. The tragedy of King Christophe, New York: Grove 1969
Une Tempête, adapted fr
http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/594
Aimé Césaire was born June 26, 1913, in Basse-Pointe, a small town on the northeast coast of Martinique in the French Caribbean. He attended the Lycée Schoelcher in Martinique, and the Parisian schools Ecole Normale Supérieure and the Lycée Louis-le-Grand.
His books of poetry include Aimé Césaire: The Collected Poetry (University of California Press, 1983); Putting in Fetters (1960); Lost Bodies (1950), with illustrations by Pablo Picasso; Decapitated Sun (1948); Miraculous Arms (1946); and Notebook of a Return to the Homeland (1939).
He is also a playwright, and has written Moi, Laminaire (1982); The Tempest (1968), based on Shakespeare's play; A Season at Congo (1966); and The Tragedy of King Cristophe (1963).
About his work, Jean-Paul Sarte wrote: "A Césaire poem explodes and whirls about itself like a rocket, suns burst forth whirling and exloding like new suns—it perpetually surpasses itself."
He is also the author of Discourse on Colonialism (1950), a book of essays which has become a classic text of French political literature and helped establish the literary and ideological movement Negritude, a term Césaire defined as "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."
As a student he and his friend, Léopold Senghor of Sénégal created L'Etudiant noir, a publication that brought together students of Africa and the West Indies. Later, with his wife, Suzanne Roussi, Césaire co-founded Tropiques, a journal dedicated to American black poetry. Both journals were a stronghold for the ideas of Negritude.
Césaire is a recipient of the International Nâzim Hikmet Poetry Award, the second winner in its history. He served as Mayor of Fort-de-France as a member of the Communist Party, and later quit the party to establish his Martinique Independent Revolution Party. He was deeply involved in the struggle for French West Indian rights and served as the deputy to the French National Assembly. He retired from politics in 1993. Césaire died on April 17, 2008 in Martinique.
A Selected Bibliography
Poetry
Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (1939)
Armes miraculeuses (1946)
Aime Cesaire, The Collected Poetry, Clayton Eshleman (Translator), (University of California Press, 1983)
Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, Clayton Eshleman (Translator), (Wesleyan Poetry, 2001)
Prose
Discours sur le colonialisme (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1953)
Discourse on Colonialism (Monthly Review Press, 1972)
- See more at: http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/594#sthash.9ETR34h2.dpuf
AIME CESAIRE
(1913-2008)
(1913-2008)
Aimé Fernand Césaire
1913–2008
Martinican author Aimé Césaire is not only responsible for Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (first published in Spanish 1942; original French version 1947; translated as Memorandum on My Martinique, 1947), a widely acknowledged masterpiece documenting the twentieth-century colonial condition, but he is also an accomplished playwright. Like his poetry and polemical essays, Césaire's plays explore the paradox of black identity under French colonial rule. Césaire's shift to drama in the late 1950s and 1960s allowed him to integrate the modernist and Surrealist techniques of his poetry and the polemics of his prose. In what Césaire describes as his "triptych" of plays, La Tragédie du roi Christophe (published 1963, produced 1964; translated as The Tragedy of King Christophe, 1970), Une Saison au Congo (published 1965; translated as A Season in the Congo, 1968; produced 1976), and Une Tempête (published and produced 1969; translated as A Tempest, 1985), he explores a series of related themes, especially the efforts of blacks—whether in Africa, the United States, or the Caribbean—to resist the powers of colonial domination.
The life of Aimé Césaire spans the twentieth century and its anticolonial movements. He was born in Basse-Pointe, in the north of the island of Martinique, the second of the six children of Fernand Césaire, a minor government official, and his wife, Eléonore, a seamstress. Although the family was poor, Césaire received a good education and early showed his aptitude for studies. He first attended the Lycée Schoelcher in Fort-de-France, the capital of Martinique, and then he received a scholarship to attend the prestigious Lycée Louis le Grand in Paris. There he met a Senegalese student, the future poet and African politician Léopold Senghor. In 1934 Césaire, with Senghor and Guyanan poet Léon Damas, founded the student journal Etudiant Noir (Black Student). This group of black Francophone intellectuals developed the concept of "Negritude," the embrace of blackness and Africanness as a counter to a legacy of colonial self-hatred.
In 1935 Césaire entered the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, where he studied American black writers, especially the poets of the Harlem Renaissance. During this time he traveled to Dalmatia and began work on his Cahier d'un retour au pays natal. With Senghor, Césaire read and discussed the ethnologist Leo Frobenius's Kulturgeschichte Afrikas (1933, History of African Culture; translated into French as Histoire de la civilization africaine, 1936). Césaire eventually passed the agrégation des lettres, the national competitive examination that leads to a career in teaching. In 1937 he married fellow Martinican student Suzanne Rossi. Their son, Jacques, the first of Césaire's four sons and two daughters, was born in 1938. In 1939 Césaire and Suzanne returned to Martinique to take up teaching positions at Lycée Schoelcher. Among Césaire's students were the writer Edouard Glissant and the critic of colonialism Frantz Fanon.
In 1939 Césaire published his first version of Cahier d'un retour au pays natal in the journal Volontés (Intentions). In this long autobiographical poem, Césaire rejected European culture, accepting his African and Caribbean roots. Juxtaposing historical data, descriptions of nature, and dream imagery, he praises the contributions of the black race to world civilization. The poem was first published as a book in Spanish in 1942, then in French in 1947. Césaire revised the poem considerably before finally publishing the definitive version in 1956. Cahier d'un retour au pays natal has become one of the best-known French poems of the twentieth century.
Césaire and his wife returned to the Caribbean as World War II began. Although Martinique was far removed from Europe, as a French territory it suffered economically from a German blockade, then later from censorship imposed by a representative of the Vichy government. During the war Césaire became increasingly critical of the Vichy government and established himself as a political voice in Martinique. In 1941 he and Suzanne founded the anticolonialist journal Tropiques (Tropics) to promote Martinican culture; he was able to publish the journal in spite of the censor. That year Césaire received a visit from André Breton, the founder of Surrealism, who had read Césaire's poetry and crossed the Atlantic to try to convince him to join his movement. Under the influence of Surrealism, Césaire wrote his second collection of poetry, Les Armes miraculeuses (1946, Miraculous Arms), and later Soleil cou-coupé (1948, Sun Cut Throat), a title taken from Guillaume Apollinaire's poem "Zone" (1912). Césaire's essay "Poésie et connaissance" (Poetry and Knowledge), published in Tropiques in 1945, espouses the Surrealist principle of poetry as a means of liberating subconscious truth.
Césaire became active in regional politics and was elected mayor of Fort-de-France and deputy to the Constituent National Assembly on the French Communist Party ticket in 1945. He then successfully fought to have Martinique and Guadeloupe recognized as overseas departments of France, which, as scholar Janis Pallister explains, the Communists believed would give the islands greater power within the political system. Henceforth, Césaire divided his time between Paris and Martinique. In 1947 he became cofounder of another journal, Présence africaine (African Presence), which published the works of black Francophone writers, notably those of Césaire's Martinican compatriot Joseph Sobel. In the 1960s the journal evolved into a publishing house of the same name.
Césaire turned his attention to the African diaspora in his poetry collection Corps perdu (1950; translated as Lost Body, 1986). During the 1950s and 1960s, Césaire remained active in both politics and literature. In the 1950s he wrote several important political essays, including Discours sur le colonialisme (1950; translated as Discourse on Colonialism, 1972) and Lettre Maurice Thorez (1956, Letter to Maurice Thorez), the latter of which explains his break with the Communist Party after the Soviet invasion of Hungary. In 1957 Césaire founded the Parti Progressiste Martiniquais (Martinique Progressive Party), and in 1959 he participated in the Second Congress of Negro Writers and Artists in Rome. While maintaining his duties as the elected deputy from Martinique to the French National Assembly in Paris, he wrote two collections of poetry on Africa and the slave experience, Ferrements (1960, Iron Chains) and Cadastre (1961; translated, 1973).
The year that Césaire left the Communist Party coincides with his earliest experiment in drama, Et les chiens se taisaient (published and broadcast 1956; translated as And the Dogs Were Silent, 1990). Césaire turned to theater in an effort to make his literary themes more accessible. His plays oscillate between lyricism, realism, and allegory, manipulating the conventions of the theater to provide a commentary on the politics of racism, colonialism, and decolonization.
Et les chiens se taisaient is adapted from a long poem of the same title that appeared at the end of Les armes miraculeuses; hence, the play clearly marks Césaire's transition from poetry to theater. According to Davis, Césaire described this work as a "lyric oratorio." The play features the Surrealism of his poetry and is difficult to stage. Et les chiens se taisaient was aired as a radio drama in France, but unlike later plays, it has not enjoyed revivals. Nevertheless, it was an important precursor to Césaire's later theatrical works, featuring many recurring themes: anger against colonial power; the painful memories of slavery and the middle passage; placing the West Indies within a global pan-African context; and the impossible situation of black political leadership in the age of decolonization.
Et les chiens se taisaient features two highly distinct styles of speech. The dense, lyrical monologues of Césaire's postcolonial hero, the Rebel, and the other Caribbean characters contrast with the rhetorically calculating style of the white colonial executives. The play also demonstrates Césaire's mastery of ancient mythology and classical dramatic traditions, drawing consciously on the myth of Osiris and Aeschylean tragedy. Additionally, as throughout Césaire's writing, dogs have a complex symbolic function. Barking dogs evoke slave masters, who used dogs against rebellious slaves; however, the image of the dog is also linked with the Egyptian god Anubis, described by Gregson Davis as "a dog-headed deity who presided over cemeteries." Césaire employs both aspects of canine imagery in this play, which centers on the death of the Rebel, Césaire's first dramatic model for the postcolonial revolutionary leader.
The beginning of the play kills much of the suspense, as the Echo (which, like the Chorus, supplies commentary on the play's events) informs the audience that "Bien sûr qu'il va mourir le Rebelle" (the Rebel will surely die). Moving the scene to a colonial prison, Césaire re-creates the appropriation of the island by the French, the horrors of the slave trade, and the arrival of white colonial bureaucrats, all through the exchange of voices among two narrators (one male and one female), madwomen, bishops, and a colonial administrator. Then the chorus reenacts a scene of black revolution, marked by "chants monotones et sauvages, piétinements confus" (wild and monotonous chants, confused stamping of feet), and rowdies crying for death to the whites. It is in this chaotic atmosphere that the Rebel emerges, depicted through the imagery of Osiris, with a dog's head and sandals resembling pale suns on his feet. As Davis explains, writers of the Negritude movement appropriated "Egyptian culture as 'black,'" and thus Césaire foregrounds the Osiris and Anubis myths rather than the Christian myths many critics have located in the play.
The second act of Et les chiens se taisaient focuses on the isolation of the Rebel, who explains that his participation in the slave revolt was motivated by his desire for equality. He imagines the world as a forest, with trees of different woods growing together in harmony. However, his refusal to be a slave was realized through violent means, and he accepts responsibility for joining--despite his denial of racial hatred--the cry of "Mort aux Blancs" (death to the whites). His mother and lover urge him to reject death, which would necessitate a tacit acceptance of colonial authority. The Rebel rejects the urging of both women, who, like other black women in Césaire's plays, represent compromise in the name of survival. Act 3 returns to the prison, where the Rebel is increasingly weakened as he is beaten by the jailer and his wife, who mock the juxtaposition of black skin and red blood. The tone of the play--and of the Rebel's monologues in particular--becomes increasingly apocalyptic and hallucinatory. Tom-toms beat as the play moves backward into an African cultural past. As the two narrators indicate, the Rebel dies in the middle of growing, fecund plants and flowers. With the death of the Rebel, the Echo's assertion at the beginning of the play is realized, but there are hints of a possible rebirth.
Although Et les chiens se taisaient is a political play, its critiques remain largely on the level of allegory and are deliberately obscure. In contrast, Césaire's next dramatic efforts, the plays of his explicitly "political triptych," comment more directly on specific historical situations of the 1950s and 1960s, especially in the context of postcolonial nationhood, leadership, and identity. The first of these plays, La Tragédie du roi Christophe, is also the first of Césaire's plays to be written expressly for the theater. It was directed by the avant-gardist Jean-Marrie Serreau, who, as Davis reports, "master-minded the première production at the Salzburg festival" in 1964 "and subsequently took it to the Théâtre de l'Odéon in Paris." Césaire's relationships with French left-wing intellectuals and artists Michel Leiris and Pablo Picasso helped the play circumvent bureaucratic obstacles, and it was a huge success. It was performed in North America, Europe, and Africa, and it was restaged at the Comédie-Française in 1991 under the government of French president François Mitterrand.
In La Tragédie du roi Christophe, Césaire provides an ironic commentary on postcolonial leadership, beginning a critique that he develops further in Une Saison au Congo. Throughout the drama he explores the fallacy of colonial imitation of the métropole (that is, France) as the protagonist, Christophe, moves from an emulation of French royalty to an embrace of his African roots that occurs only as he nears death.
The play opens with a cockfight whose participants are Christophe and Pétion, named after the rulers of divided Haiti in the early nineteenth century. A commentator describes the Haitian Revolution, in which Christophe served as a general under Toussaint L'Ouverture. Christophe is appointed the president of the republic, but he abandons the city of Port-au-Prince to Pétion and the mulatto class, establishing himself as a king in the northern region of Haiti. Césaire thus begins to demonstrate how swiftly the ideals of the revolution can be betrayed. From the beginning of the play Christophe's character vacillates between his commitment to black freedom and his embrace of the legacy of black slavery and exploitation in Haiti. Christophe attests to his countrymen that "de noms de gloire je veux couvrir vos noms d'esclaves" (with names of glory I will cover your slave names), vowing to reclaim a black identity erased by slavery. Meanwhile, he wants to build a citadel as a symbol of freed Haiti but, ironically, can only do so by putting demands on his workers reminiscent of slavery. Césaire makes it clear that Christophe's drives, imitative of white oppression, are part of his undoing.
In Acts 2 and 3, the optimism at first associated with Christophe's leadership rapidly dissipates. One of the ladies of the court realizes that Christophe's path to liberty closely resembles the path to slavery, "Si bien que celle de la liberté et celle de l'esclavage se confondraient" (So well that those of liberty and slavery could be mistaken for each other). It soon emerges that Christophe, despite his desire for black freedom, is deeply invested in the logic and rhetoric of slavery. As he forcibly marries a group of men and women, his language begins to resemble that of a slave master as he praises the bodies of the women and their potential for work. Obsessed by fears of betrayal, Christophe orders the death of Archbishop Brelle, who threatens to expose the growing corruption in Haiti. Then, as labor continues on the citadel--work the stage directions compare with the building of the pyramids--a storm strikes Christophe's garrison and treasury; here, as in Une Tempête, a storm symbolizes an impending social and political crisis. This crisis comes to a head in the progressively surreal third act. At a lavish state event, Christophe brings in five African men dressed in their native country's robes. He claims to have bought them from a slave ship and purchased their freedom. However, as Christophe parades the Africans through the court, it becomes clear that he has only perpetuated their enslavement. During the Feast of the Assumption, which celebrates the ascension of the Virgin Mary into heaven, the ghost of Brelle appears in the church and curses Christophe, who collapses, paralyzed. As the play draws to a close, Christophe appears as a mad, old, feeble king, betrayed by his own soldiers, and with his people in revolt. Invoking Africa and speaking in Creole, Christophe commits suicide.
Christophe's political agent, Hugonin, appears alone on stage after Christophe's death. In evening clothes, Hugonin apologizes for his lateness and drunkenness. He then reveals himself to be Baron Samedi, the voodoo god associated with death and funerals. Here Césaire suggests that under the veneer of Frenchness and officiality associated with Hugonin there lies an authentic vestige of Haitian culture. Both Hugonin and Christophe have repressed their African and Caribbean heritages beneath a veneer of Frenchness with similarly tragic results. For Césaire, the task of the postcolonial writer is to synthesize these heritages.
The second play of Césaire's political triptych is Une Saison au Congo, which recounts the rise, fall, and assassination of Congolese political leader Patrice Lumumba. Published in 1965, the play recounts the Congo's declaration of independence from Belgian colonial rule, its rise to independence as Zaire under the leadership of Lumumba, and its neocolonial subjection under the ambitious but corrupt Mokutu, a thinly veiled portrayal of Mobutu Sésé Seko, the former president of Zaire. The play's topical nature affected its production history: as Davis reports, the Belgian authorities tried to suppress the production of the play, which was first staged in Brussels. Césaire's supporters among the intellectuals of Paris intervened and, according to Davis, "succeeded in circumventing these obstacles." When the play was staged in Paris under the direction of avant-garde director Serreau, Davis claims that it "provoked unease" among the "educated Zairean population."
The title of the play carries a double purpose: it makes clear that the true subject matter of the play is not simply that of the tragic hero Lumumba but the tragedy of the Congo and all of its people. Additionally, the title associates the Congo with hell through its allusion to Arthur Rimbaud's prose poem Une Saison en enfer (1873; translated as "A Season in Hell," 1931). Césaire introduces his audience to the Congo/ hell through Lumumba, who begins the play as a bonimenteur (beer seller). By beginning with the image of Lumumba selling beer, Césaire exploits the irony of politics as salesmanship. As he tells the audience that "le bock de bière est désormais le symbole de notre droit congolais et de nos libertés congolaises" (in the Congo a mug of beer is the symbol of all our rights and liberties), Lumumba emphasizes the artificial nature of rights under colonialism. Here, as in Une Tempête, Césaire emphasizes how colonizers bring the pleasures of alcohol, which is a means for keeping a subject population in its place. The introductory scene also foregrounds the gender politics of the play when a heckler cries that Polar Beer, the brand of beer Lumumba is selling, threatens to make men impotent. Lumumba's appeal to the women in the audience to disprove that claim underscores his masculine authority. The scene also introduces a sanza (mbira) player, who like a wandering Greek chorus figure, comments on events. For example, as the Belgian police watch Lumumba with concern, the sanza player, whom they dismiss as a "nuisance," sings "Ata-ndele" (Sooner or Later).
As the play depicts Lumumba's rise to power, it reveals the colonial and neocolonial forces working to undercut the Congo's bid for independence. Césaire uses poetic form to underscore the control colonial forces exercise over the fate of the newly independent state. In caricatures of a series of bankers, the dialogue moves into sustained rhymed couplets; in their speeches, the bankers make it clear that avarice and economic corruption will cause the downfall of the free Congo's leaders. In contrast, Lumumba's long monologue evoking the Congo as both mother and child, perhaps the most beautiful of the play, is written in lyrical free verse.
Césaire next exposes the false rhetoric of the "civilizing mission" the Belgian colonizers used to justify their appropriation of the Congo: the departing president reminds the crowd that King Leopold came to the Congo in the name of civilization rather than diamonds or gold mines. Then Césaire expands his critique of the colonizers to include both the ostensibly neutral forces of the United Nations, embodied in the character of Dag Hammarskjöld, and those of the "Ambassadeur Grand Occidental," a figure for American political power. The Ambassador justifies his country's authority through the belief that it is the watchdog of the world and has a particular mandate to guard against Communism. Underscoring the American role in the tragedy of the Congo, Césaire radicalizes the argument of the play, moving past the conflict between colonizer and colonized to mete out global culpability.
The last two acts of Une Saison au Congo chart the political fall of Lumumba and, ultimately, his murder. Act 2 demonstrates how rapidly Lumumba's authority is threatened by outside forces as well as by competition within the newly independent Congo. Lumumba is betrayed by those he trusts the most, especially his soldier and supporter Mokutu. He is also denied use of the radio to communicate with his people, which Césaire, like fellow Martinican intellectual and contributor to Présence africaine Fanon, identifies as central to the effectiveness of resistance movements. Having distributed the responsibility for Lumumba's downfall onto the range of forces established in act 1, in the third act Césaire has an unnamed white mercenary serve as Lumumba's murderer. At this juncture the play goes from being realistic to increasingly impressionistic. Hammarskjöld, Mokutu, and Lumumba's other enemies step onstage to admit their complicity in Lumumba's death.
The original edition of the play ends on a slightly optimistic note: the final moments take place at the Independence Day celebrations in Kinshasa. Although Mokutu, lacking Lumumba's natural eloquence, harangues the audience, it is the sanza player who has the last word, exhorting the newly independent nation, and its leaders, to "grow straight" and "to keep it clean." However, Césaire added a scene for the 1973 edition of the play in which Mokutu admits his betrayal of Lumumba and openly acknowledges his manipulation of the people of the newly independent Congo. This ending is much darker than the original. After Mokutu exhorts the crowd, he bids his soldiers to fire into the throng, killing the sanza player and others. As the smoke dissipates, Mokutu leaves the stage. With the new ending Césaire offers an increasingly skeptical perspective on neocolonial power: with the rise of the dictator, a new reign of terror has begun. Hence, Césaire's use of the indefinite article in the play's title, which corresponds to the indefinite article in the last play of Césaire's triptych, Une Tempête: Lumumba's rise and fall is just one season of many in the Congo's struggle for freedom, just as the "tempest" of the third play's title is only one storm of many in the history of colonial confrontation.
The title page of Une Tempête announces its revisionary relationship with Shakespeare's play The Tempest and its overturning of what Pallister calls the "master-slave dynamic" of that play: "d'après 'la Tempête' de Shakespeare--Adaptation pour un théâtre nègre" (according to The Tempest of Shakespeare--An Adaptation for Black Theater). Césaire's use of the phrase "black theater" is significant in its claim for a black transnational identity. The play makes reference to the postcolonial relations of the French Caribbean and the métropole; the postcolonial struggles of Africa; and the struggles of the Black Power and Civil Rights movements in the United States. With this play Césaire argues for a diasporic black identity that works to reverse the stifling binary of colonizer and colonized.
In contrast to Une Saison au Congo, which is largely realist in style, Une Tempête establishes itself as self-consciously theatrical from the beginning. Le Meneur du jeu (the Master of Ceremonies) enters the stage, inviting each actor to take up his own character and mask. Nature is identified as a vital character in the play, and the storm and the wind are invited to take up their own parts. By beginning the play in this manner, Césaire inverts the culture/nature dyad endemic to colonialism: not only are humans unable to control nature, but they are equal to nature as performers in the drama. Significantly, when Prospero enters the stage, he reminds Miranda that the shipwreck they are witnessing is only a play.
Césaire revises, racializes, and politicizes the relationships Shakespeare creates among Prospero, Ariel, and Caliban. Ariel is characterized as a mulatto slave, while Caliban is a black slave. By figuring Ariel as a mulatto, Césaire presents him as an ambivalent intermediary between white and black and colonizer and colonized, representing the position of the mulatto class in the Martinique of Césaire's upbringing. Caliban, on the other hand, is presented as a black nationalist: he enters the stage crying "Uhuru," the Swahili word for "freedom." Césaire depicts the relationship between Prospero and Caliban as analogous to that between the colonizer and colonized as portrayed in Une saison au Congo: Prospero congratulates himself for having given Caliban language, yet characterizes him as an ape. Caliban, however, understands the gift of language in an explicitly anticolonial and ironic manner: "Tu ne m'as rien appris du tout. Sauf, bien sûr, baragouiner ton langage pour comprende tes ordres" (You didn't teach me a thing. Except to jabber in your own language so that I could understand your orders).
Césaire introduces an element of environmental anticolonialism as well: Caliban says to Prospero, "tu crois que la terre est chose Mort . . . C'est tellement commode! Morte, alors on la piétine, on la souille, on la foule d'un pied vanqueur" (you think the earth is dead . . . it's so much simpler that way! Dead, you can walk on it, pollute it, you can tread upon it with the steps of a conqueror). As in Une Saison au Congo, in which Lumumba characterizes the Congo as both mother and child, here the land is both feminized and personified, and to respect the land implies a rejection of the patriarchal and hierarchical objectives of colonial power.
Where Shakespeare's play makes Prospero the sorcerer, in Césaire's play Caliban also has the powers of sorcery. Césaire presents Caliban as agent in the relationship rather than simply a slave: Prospero has given Caliban language, and Caliban teaches Prospero about the natural world of the island. Caliban is also linked with the destructive forces of nature, invoking the thunder god Shango to increase his power. The initial conflict between the two characters staged in act 1 concludes with Caliban's renunciation of his colonial identity and claiming the radical identity of black nationalism: "Appelle-moi X . . . l'homme dont on a volé le nom" (Call me X . . . a man whose history has been stolen). All of Caliban's dialogue with Prospero make use of tu, the familiar second-person pronoun, which means that Caliban addresses his ostensible master as an equal. Ariel, however, uses the vous form, underscoring his inability to reject his master and his liminal position between colonizer and colonized.
As the play progresses, Césaire further alters Shakespeare's original by demystifying the love relationship between Fernando and Miranda; Fernando cheats Miranda at cards, claiming that his deceptions will provide her a good introduction to the less innocent world she will encounter upon leaving the island. However, Fernando and Miranda disappear from the plot shortly before the play's conclusion.
Césaire continues emphasizing the play's racial politics with the Shakespearean fools Stephano and Trinculo, who both wish to turn Caliban into a museum piece and exhibit him in Europe. Such abuses not only happened during Shakespeare's lifetime, but throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries many colonial subjects had been turned into museum exhibits and freak shows. Finally, the play moves toward a reversal of the colonial binary. Prospero's staging of a performance of the Roman gods--ostensibly to instruct his daughter and future son-in-law in beauty and harmony--is disrupted by the entrance of the African god Eshu, the priapic trickster god who signifies reversal in ancient African cultures. Ultimately, Caliban and Prospero stay together on the island, but not until Caliban makes an impassioned speech for his freedom. As the play nears its close, Caliban and Prospero seem locked in unresolvable conflict, as Caliban damns the colonial enterprise, and Prospero vows to fight back. In the brief final speech, which occurs after the curtain is half-raised to indicate the passage of time, Prospero appears physically aged and weary. Despite his efforts to defend civilization on the island, it appears that nature is winning; the island is overrun with animals, and even the climate has changed. Just as Césaire begins the play by making storm and wind active characters in the drama, he ends the play by suggesting that nature has overwhelmed even the force of colonial power.
After 1970 Césaire published another volume of poetry, Moi, laminaire (1982, I, Laminary) and several more political and historical essays. In 1982 Mitterrand appointed him president of the regional council for the French départements d'outremer (Overseas Departments), a position that allowed him to encourage the economic and cultural development of his native Martinique. In 1993 he retired from national political life in Paris to Fort-de-France, Martinique, which acknowledged the island's debt to a great champion of its liberation and culture with a municipal celebration of his ninetieth birthday in 2003.
Pallister has stated that Aimé Césaire's writing "expresses the need for revolution, for change in a flawed and prejudiced world." All of his plays, especially the triptych, draw on history, African myth, and European literature to create a portrait of the Caribbean that both avows the damage done by capitalism and colonialism and underlines the difficulty of achieving liberation from this legacy. The latter problem is indicated in the fact that neither Césaire nor his characters choose to speak Creole in a sustained way. Additionally, each play offers a version of the postcolonial black male intellectual coming of age and taking responsibility for his people but hesitating to cut ties with France. Césaire's move from poet to dramatist at the time when he broke his ties with the Communist Party in the 1950s was motivated, in Davis's words, "by a sincere desire on his part to narrow the gap in communication between avant-garde writer and provincial audience," to reach the Martinican people with his vision of Caribbean civilization through a literary form more accessible than his poetry. Thus, Césaire's plays continue to be performed and studied as both political activism and popular theater.
— Meredith Goldsmith, Whitman College.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
PLAY PRODUCTIONS
La Tragedie du roi Christophe, Salzburg, Austria, Salzburg Festival, 4 August 1964.
Une Tempête, Hammamet, Festival d'Hammamet, Summer 1969.
Une Saison au Congo, Paris, Theater de l'Est, 4 October 1976.
BOOKS
Cahier d'un retour au pays natal, translated into Spanish by Lydia Cabrera as Retorno al país natal, preface by Benjamin Peret, illustrated by Wilfredo Lam (Havana: Molina y Cía, 1942); original French version (Paris: Brodas, 1947); Cahier d'un retour au pays natal: Memorandum on My Martinique, French and English edition, English translation by Lionel Abel and Ivan Goll, preface by André Breton (New York: Brentano's, 1947); definitive edition, preface by Petar Guberina (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1956).
Les Armes miraculeuses (Paris: Gallimard, 1946).
Soleil cou-coupé (Paris: Editions K, 1948).
Corps perdu, with illustrations by Pablo Picasso (Paris: Fragrance, 1950); translated by Clayton Eschleman and Annette Smith as Lost Body (New York: Braziller, 1986).
Discours sur le colonialisme (Paris: Réclame, 1950); translated by Joan Pinkham as Discourse on Colonialism (New York: Monthly Review, 1972).
Et les chiens se taisaient (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1956); translated by Eshleman and Smith as And the Dogs Were Silent, in Aimé Césaire: Lyric and Dramatic Poetry, 1946-1982 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1990), pp. 1-74.
Lettre Maurice Thorez, foreword by Alioune Diop (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1956).
Ferrements (Paris: Seuil, 1960).
Toussaint Louverture: La Révolution française et le problème colonial (Paris: Le Club français du livre, 1960); revised and enlarged edition, preface by Charles André Julien (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1962).
Cadastre (Paris: Seuil, 1961); translated by Emile Snyder and Sanford Upson, introduction by Snyder (New York: Third World Press, 1973).
La Tragédie du roi Christophe (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1963); translated by Ralph Manheim as The Tragedy of King Christophe ( New York: Grove, 1970).
Une Saison au Congo (Paris: Seuil, 1965); translated by Manheim as A Season in the Congo (New York: Grove, 1968; revised edition, Paris: Seuil, 1973).
Une Tempête, d'après "La tempête" de Shakespeare--Adaptation pour un théâtre nègre (Paris: Seuil, 1969); translated by Richard Miller as A Tempest, Based on Shakespeare's The Tempest--Adaptation for a Black Theatre (New York: Borchardt, 1985).
Moi, laminaire (Paris: Seuil, 1982).
EDITIONS AND COLLECTIONS
Aimé Césaire, écrivain martiniquais, edited by Monique and Simon Battestini (Paris: Nathan, 1967).
La Tragédie du roi Christophe (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1970).
OEuvres complètes, 3 volumes (Fort-de-France, Martinique: Editions Désormeaux, 1976)--comprises volume 1, Poésie; volume 2, Théâtre; and volume 3, OEuvre historique et politique.
Tropiques, by Césaire, René Ménil, and others, 2 volumes, edited by Césaire (Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 1978).
Et les chiens se taisaient (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1989).
La Poésie, edited by Daniel Maximin and Gilles Carpentier (Paris: Seuil, 1994).
EDITIONS IN ENGLISH
State of the Union: Poems, translated by Clayton Eshleman and Denis Kelly, Caterpillar, no. 1 (Bloomington, Ind. & Cleveland, Ohio: Asphodel Book Shop, 1966).
Aimé Césaire: The Collected Poetry, edited and translated by Eshleman and Annette Smith (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983).
Non-Vicious Circle: Twenty Poems of Aimé Césaire, translated and edited, with an introduction, by Gregson Davis (Stanford, Cal.: Stanford University Press, 1984).
Aimé Césaire: Lyric and Dramatic Poetry: 1946-82, translated by Eshleman and Smith (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1990).
A Tempest, Based on Shakespeare's The Tempest--Adaptation for a Black Theatre, translated by Philip Crispin (London: Oberon, 2000).
PRODUCED SCRIPT
Et les chiens se taisaient, radio, Radio France, 1956.
OTHER
"Poésie et connaissance," Tropiques, 12 (1945): 157-170.
Victor Schoelcher, Esclavage et colonisation, edited by Emile Tersen, introduction by Césaire (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1948).
Commémoration du centenaire de l'abolition de l'esclavage: Discours prononcés la Sorbonne, le 27 avril 1948, by Césaire and others, introduction by Edouard Depreux (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1948).
René Depestre, Végétations de clarté, preface by Césaire (Paris: Seghers, 1951).
"Décolonisation pour les Antilles," Présence africaine (April-May 1956): 7-12.
"Culture et colonisation," Présence africaine (September 1956): 190-205.
Daniel Guérin, Antilles décolonisées, preface by Césaire (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1956).
Sékou Touré, Expérience Guinéenne et unité africaine, preface by Césaire (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1959).
"L'Homme de culture et ses responsabilités," Présence africaine (March-April 1959): 116-122.
"Deuil aux Antilles," Présence africaine (Third Trimester 1962): 221-222.
"Société et littérature dans les Antilles," "Discours sur l'art africain," and "Esthéthique césairienne," Etudes littèraires, 6, no. 1 (1973): 9-20, 99-109, 111-112.
FURTHER READING
REFERENCES:
Lillian Pestre de Almaida, "Le Bestiaire symbolique dans Une Saison au Congo: Analyse stylistique des images zoomorphes dans la piece de Cesaire," Présence francophone, 13 (Fall 1976): 93-105.
Almaida, "Les Deux textes de Et les chiens se taisaient," OEuvres et critiques, 4 (Fall 1979): 203-211.
Albert James Arnold, Modernism and Negritude: The Poetry and Poetics of Aimé Césaire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981).
Charlotte Brow, "The Meaning of Caliban in Black Literature Today," Comparative Literature Studies, 13 (September 1976): 240-253.
Frederick Ivor Case, "Aimé Césaire et l'Occident chrétien," Esprit créateur, 10 (Fall 1970): 242-256.
Marc-A. Christophe, "Totalitarianism and Authoritarianism in Aimé Césaire's La Tragédie du roi Christophe," CLA Journal, 22 (1978): 31-45.
Guy Daninos, "Une Tempête de Césaire ou le prélude d'une nouvelle renaissance," Licorne, 9 (1985): 153-160.
Gregson Davis, Aimé Césaire (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
Hervé Fuyet and others, "Décolonisation et classes sociales dans La Tragédie du roi Christophe," French Review, 46 (May 1973): 1101-1106.
Clément Mbom, Le Théâtre d'Aimé Césaire, ou La primauté de l'universalité (Paris: Nathan, 1979).
Ernest Moutoussamy, Aimé Césaire: député l'Assemblé nationale, 1945-1993 (Paris: L'Harmattan, 1993).
Georges Ngal, Aimé Césaire, un homme la recherche d'une patrie (Dakar: Nouvelles éditions africaines, [1975]; republished, Paris: Présence Africaine, 1994).
Albert Owusu-Sarpong, Le Temps historique dans l'ouvre théâtrale d'Aimé Césaire (Sherbrooke, Quebec: Naaman, 1986; Paris: L'Harmattan, 2002).
Janis L. Pallister, Aimé Césaire (New York: Twayne, 1991).
Ernstpeter Ruhe, Aimé Césaire et Janheinz Jahn, les débuts du théâtre césairien: La nouvelle version de "Et les chiens se taisaient" (Würzburg, Germany: Königshausen & Neumann, 1990).
AIME CESAIRE, 1913-2008: IN CELEBRATION OF THE CENTENNIAL OF HIS BIRTH
(DOCUMENTARY MATERIAL: LECTURES, COMMENTARY AND INTERVIEWS ON VIDEO)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWrk9488094
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhE7X55QqPk&list=PL4B3F3932C54D12B7
ROBIN KELLEY ON THE PROFOUND LITERARY AND POLITICAL LEGACY OF AIME CESAIRE
(Interview on 'Democracy Now!'):
(Aime Cesaire-poet, politician, activist, 1913-2008)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dG8rvp0BmOg
Aimé Césaire - Discours sur le colonialisme (Discourse on colonialism):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mok1XYQ-p3Y
Aime Cesaire - YouTube Videos:
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www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWrk9488094
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Philosopher extraodinaire from Martinique. One of the founding fathers of Negritude.
Aime Cesaire-poet, politician activist, 1913-2008 - YouTube
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Apr 22, 2008 - 8 min - Uploaded by IWantDemocracyNow
Aime Cesaire, 1913-2008: Remembering the Life and Legacy of the Black Pride Poet and Anti ...
Aimé Césaire - Discours sur le colonialisme - YouTube
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Jun 29, 2008 - 11 min - Uploaded by ThysmLab
Hommage à Aimé Césaire, Discours sur le colonialisme.
Aimé Césaire - YouTube
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May 5, 2008 - 3 min - Uploaded by studiofarlando
Monsieur le Maire Aimé Césaire speaks candidly about his first encounter with Léopold Sédar ...
François Marthouret Lit Calendrier Lagunaire D' Aimé Césaire ...
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Oct 8, 2012 - 3 min - Uploaded by Alexandre Litterae
François Marthouret Lit Calendrier Lagunaire D' Aimé Césaire - YouTube. Subscribe 1,600 ...
Aimé Césaire Euzhan Palcy AU RDV DE LA CONQUETE 1 - YouTube
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Coffret 3 DVDs Aimé Césaire : Une parole pour le 21ème siècle - A voice for 21st century par / by ...
A Season In The Congo by Aime Cesaire - YouTube
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Excerpts from Aime Cesaire's A Season in the Congo, a mixed media, theatrical production ...
SEYNI & YELIBA "L'Ombre Gagne" (Aimé Césaire ... - YouTube
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https://myspace.com/seyniyeliba Hommage à Aimé Césaire lors du Festival SENEFESTI, le 29 06 ...
Aimé Césaire - Cahier d'un retour au Pays natal - YouTube
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Jul 31, 2011 - 67 min - Uploaded by JudasSurLeMonde
Aimé Césaire - Cahier d'un retour au Pays natal ... Vidéo Ina Aimé CESAIRE, Léopold Sédar ...
Aimé Cesaire - YouTube
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Nov 26, 2012 - 2 min - Uploaded by CameraoneTv
Moi nègre Parole de révolte Parole de ressentiment Sans doute Mais aussi parole de fidélité, Parole ...
1913–2008
Martinican author Aimé Césaire is not only responsible for Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (first published in Spanish 1942; original French version 1947; translated as Memorandum on My Martinique, 1947), a widely acknowledged masterpiece documenting the twentieth-century colonial condition, but he is also an accomplished playwright. Like his poetry and polemical essays, Césaire's plays explore the paradox of black identity under French colonial rule. Césaire's shift to drama in the late 1950s and 1960s allowed him to integrate the modernist and Surrealist techniques of his poetry and the polemics of his prose. In what Césaire describes as his "triptych" of plays, La Tragédie du roi Christophe (published 1963, produced 1964; translated as The Tragedy of King Christophe, 1970), Une Saison au Congo (published 1965; translated as A Season in the Congo, 1968; produced 1976), and Une Tempête (published and produced 1969; translated as A Tempest, 1985), he explores a series of related themes, especially the efforts of blacks—whether in Africa, the United States, or the Caribbean—to resist the powers of colonial domination.
The life of Aimé Césaire spans the twentieth century and its anticolonial movements. He was born in Basse-Pointe, in the north of the island of Martinique, the second of the six children of Fernand Césaire, a minor government official, and his wife, Eléonore, a seamstress. Although the family was poor, Césaire received a good education and early showed his aptitude for studies. He first attended the Lycée Schoelcher in Fort-de-France, the capital of Martinique, and then he received a scholarship to attend the prestigious Lycée Louis le Grand in Paris. There he met a Senegalese student, the future poet and African politician Léopold Senghor. In 1934 Césaire, with Senghor and Guyanan poet Léon Damas, founded the student journal Etudiant Noir (Black Student). This group of black Francophone intellectuals developed the concept of "Negritude," the embrace of blackness and Africanness as a counter to a legacy of colonial self-hatred.
In 1935 Césaire entered the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, where he studied American black writers, especially the poets of the Harlem Renaissance. During this time he traveled to Dalmatia and began work on his Cahier d'un retour au pays natal. With Senghor, Césaire read and discussed the ethnologist Leo Frobenius's Kulturgeschichte Afrikas (1933, History of African Culture; translated into French as Histoire de la civilization africaine, 1936). Césaire eventually passed the agrégation des lettres, the national competitive examination that leads to a career in teaching. In 1937 he married fellow Martinican student Suzanne Rossi. Their son, Jacques, the first of Césaire's four sons and two daughters, was born in 1938. In 1939 Césaire and Suzanne returned to Martinique to take up teaching positions at Lycée Schoelcher. Among Césaire's students were the writer Edouard Glissant and the critic of colonialism Frantz Fanon.
In 1939 Césaire published his first version of Cahier d'un retour au pays natal in the journal Volontés (Intentions). In this long autobiographical poem, Césaire rejected European culture, accepting his African and Caribbean roots. Juxtaposing historical data, descriptions of nature, and dream imagery, he praises the contributions of the black race to world civilization. The poem was first published as a book in Spanish in 1942, then in French in 1947. Césaire revised the poem considerably before finally publishing the definitive version in 1956. Cahier d'un retour au pays natal has become one of the best-known French poems of the twentieth century.
Césaire and his wife returned to the Caribbean as World War II began. Although Martinique was far removed from Europe, as a French territory it suffered economically from a German blockade, then later from censorship imposed by a representative of the Vichy government. During the war Césaire became increasingly critical of the Vichy government and established himself as a political voice in Martinique. In 1941 he and Suzanne founded the anticolonialist journal Tropiques (Tropics) to promote Martinican culture; he was able to publish the journal in spite of the censor. That year Césaire received a visit from André Breton, the founder of Surrealism, who had read Césaire's poetry and crossed the Atlantic to try to convince him to join his movement. Under the influence of Surrealism, Césaire wrote his second collection of poetry, Les Armes miraculeuses (1946, Miraculous Arms), and later Soleil cou-coupé (1948, Sun Cut Throat), a title taken from Guillaume Apollinaire's poem "Zone" (1912). Césaire's essay "Poésie et connaissance" (Poetry and Knowledge), published in Tropiques in 1945, espouses the Surrealist principle of poetry as a means of liberating subconscious truth.
Césaire became active in regional politics and was elected mayor of Fort-de-France and deputy to the Constituent National Assembly on the French Communist Party ticket in 1945. He then successfully fought to have Martinique and Guadeloupe recognized as overseas departments of France, which, as scholar Janis Pallister explains, the Communists believed would give the islands greater power within the political system. Henceforth, Césaire divided his time between Paris and Martinique. In 1947 he became cofounder of another journal, Présence africaine (African Presence), which published the works of black Francophone writers, notably those of Césaire's Martinican compatriot Joseph Sobel. In the 1960s the journal evolved into a publishing house of the same name.
Césaire turned his attention to the African diaspora in his poetry collection Corps perdu (1950; translated as Lost Body, 1986). During the 1950s and 1960s, Césaire remained active in both politics and literature. In the 1950s he wrote several important political essays, including Discours sur le colonialisme (1950; translated as Discourse on Colonialism, 1972) and Lettre Maurice Thorez (1956, Letter to Maurice Thorez), the latter of which explains his break with the Communist Party after the Soviet invasion of Hungary. In 1957 Césaire founded the Parti Progressiste Martiniquais (Martinique Progressive Party), and in 1959 he participated in the Second Congress of Negro Writers and Artists in Rome. While maintaining his duties as the elected deputy from Martinique to the French National Assembly in Paris, he wrote two collections of poetry on Africa and the slave experience, Ferrements (1960, Iron Chains) and Cadastre (1961; translated, 1973).
The year that Césaire left the Communist Party coincides with his earliest experiment in drama, Et les chiens se taisaient (published and broadcast 1956; translated as And the Dogs Were Silent, 1990). Césaire turned to theater in an effort to make his literary themes more accessible. His plays oscillate between lyricism, realism, and allegory, manipulating the conventions of the theater to provide a commentary on the politics of racism, colonialism, and decolonization.
Et les chiens se taisaient is adapted from a long poem of the same title that appeared at the end of Les armes miraculeuses; hence, the play clearly marks Césaire's transition from poetry to theater. According to Davis, Césaire described this work as a "lyric oratorio." The play features the Surrealism of his poetry and is difficult to stage. Et les chiens se taisaient was aired as a radio drama in France, but unlike later plays, it has not enjoyed revivals. Nevertheless, it was an important precursor to Césaire's later theatrical works, featuring many recurring themes: anger against colonial power; the painful memories of slavery and the middle passage; placing the West Indies within a global pan-African context; and the impossible situation of black political leadership in the age of decolonization.
Et les chiens se taisaient features two highly distinct styles of speech. The dense, lyrical monologues of Césaire's postcolonial hero, the Rebel, and the other Caribbean characters contrast with the rhetorically calculating style of the white colonial executives. The play also demonstrates Césaire's mastery of ancient mythology and classical dramatic traditions, drawing consciously on the myth of Osiris and Aeschylean tragedy. Additionally, as throughout Césaire's writing, dogs have a complex symbolic function. Barking dogs evoke slave masters, who used dogs against rebellious slaves; however, the image of the dog is also linked with the Egyptian god Anubis, described by Gregson Davis as "a dog-headed deity who presided over cemeteries." Césaire employs both aspects of canine imagery in this play, which centers on the death of the Rebel, Césaire's first dramatic model for the postcolonial revolutionary leader.
The beginning of the play kills much of the suspense, as the Echo (which, like the Chorus, supplies commentary on the play's events) informs the audience that "Bien sûr qu'il va mourir le Rebelle" (the Rebel will surely die). Moving the scene to a colonial prison, Césaire re-creates the appropriation of the island by the French, the horrors of the slave trade, and the arrival of white colonial bureaucrats, all through the exchange of voices among two narrators (one male and one female), madwomen, bishops, and a colonial administrator. Then the chorus reenacts a scene of black revolution, marked by "chants monotones et sauvages, piétinements confus" (wild and monotonous chants, confused stamping of feet), and rowdies crying for death to the whites. It is in this chaotic atmosphere that the Rebel emerges, depicted through the imagery of Osiris, with a dog's head and sandals resembling pale suns on his feet. As Davis explains, writers of the Negritude movement appropriated "Egyptian culture as 'black,'" and thus Césaire foregrounds the Osiris and Anubis myths rather than the Christian myths many critics have located in the play.
The second act of Et les chiens se taisaient focuses on the isolation of the Rebel, who explains that his participation in the slave revolt was motivated by his desire for equality. He imagines the world as a forest, with trees of different woods growing together in harmony. However, his refusal to be a slave was realized through violent means, and he accepts responsibility for joining--despite his denial of racial hatred--the cry of "Mort aux Blancs" (death to the whites). His mother and lover urge him to reject death, which would necessitate a tacit acceptance of colonial authority. The Rebel rejects the urging of both women, who, like other black women in Césaire's plays, represent compromise in the name of survival. Act 3 returns to the prison, where the Rebel is increasingly weakened as he is beaten by the jailer and his wife, who mock the juxtaposition of black skin and red blood. The tone of the play--and of the Rebel's monologues in particular--becomes increasingly apocalyptic and hallucinatory. Tom-toms beat as the play moves backward into an African cultural past. As the two narrators indicate, the Rebel dies in the middle of growing, fecund plants and flowers. With the death of the Rebel, the Echo's assertion at the beginning of the play is realized, but there are hints of a possible rebirth.
Although Et les chiens se taisaient is a political play, its critiques remain largely on the level of allegory and are deliberately obscure. In contrast, Césaire's next dramatic efforts, the plays of his explicitly "political triptych," comment more directly on specific historical situations of the 1950s and 1960s, especially in the context of postcolonial nationhood, leadership, and identity. The first of these plays, La Tragédie du roi Christophe, is also the first of Césaire's plays to be written expressly for the theater. It was directed by the avant-gardist Jean-Marrie Serreau, who, as Davis reports, "master-minded the première production at the Salzburg festival" in 1964 "and subsequently took it to the Théâtre de l'Odéon in Paris." Césaire's relationships with French left-wing intellectuals and artists Michel Leiris and Pablo Picasso helped the play circumvent bureaucratic obstacles, and it was a huge success. It was performed in North America, Europe, and Africa, and it was restaged at the Comédie-Française in 1991 under the government of French president François Mitterrand.
In La Tragédie du roi Christophe, Césaire provides an ironic commentary on postcolonial leadership, beginning a critique that he develops further in Une Saison au Congo. Throughout the drama he explores the fallacy of colonial imitation of the métropole (that is, France) as the protagonist, Christophe, moves from an emulation of French royalty to an embrace of his African roots that occurs only as he nears death.
The play opens with a cockfight whose participants are Christophe and Pétion, named after the rulers of divided Haiti in the early nineteenth century. A commentator describes the Haitian Revolution, in which Christophe served as a general under Toussaint L'Ouverture. Christophe is appointed the president of the republic, but he abandons the city of Port-au-Prince to Pétion and the mulatto class, establishing himself as a king in the northern region of Haiti. Césaire thus begins to demonstrate how swiftly the ideals of the revolution can be betrayed. From the beginning of the play Christophe's character vacillates between his commitment to black freedom and his embrace of the legacy of black slavery and exploitation in Haiti. Christophe attests to his countrymen that "de noms de gloire je veux couvrir vos noms d'esclaves" (with names of glory I will cover your slave names), vowing to reclaim a black identity erased by slavery. Meanwhile, he wants to build a citadel as a symbol of freed Haiti but, ironically, can only do so by putting demands on his workers reminiscent of slavery. Césaire makes it clear that Christophe's drives, imitative of white oppression, are part of his undoing.
In Acts 2 and 3, the optimism at first associated with Christophe's leadership rapidly dissipates. One of the ladies of the court realizes that Christophe's path to liberty closely resembles the path to slavery, "Si bien que celle de la liberté et celle de l'esclavage se confondraient" (So well that those of liberty and slavery could be mistaken for each other). It soon emerges that Christophe, despite his desire for black freedom, is deeply invested in the logic and rhetoric of slavery. As he forcibly marries a group of men and women, his language begins to resemble that of a slave master as he praises the bodies of the women and their potential for work. Obsessed by fears of betrayal, Christophe orders the death of Archbishop Brelle, who threatens to expose the growing corruption in Haiti. Then, as labor continues on the citadel--work the stage directions compare with the building of the pyramids--a storm strikes Christophe's garrison and treasury; here, as in Une Tempête, a storm symbolizes an impending social and political crisis. This crisis comes to a head in the progressively surreal third act. At a lavish state event, Christophe brings in five African men dressed in their native country's robes. He claims to have bought them from a slave ship and purchased their freedom. However, as Christophe parades the Africans through the court, it becomes clear that he has only perpetuated their enslavement. During the Feast of the Assumption, which celebrates the ascension of the Virgin Mary into heaven, the ghost of Brelle appears in the church and curses Christophe, who collapses, paralyzed. As the play draws to a close, Christophe appears as a mad, old, feeble king, betrayed by his own soldiers, and with his people in revolt. Invoking Africa and speaking in Creole, Christophe commits suicide.
Christophe's political agent, Hugonin, appears alone on stage after Christophe's death. In evening clothes, Hugonin apologizes for his lateness and drunkenness. He then reveals himself to be Baron Samedi, the voodoo god associated with death and funerals. Here Césaire suggests that under the veneer of Frenchness and officiality associated with Hugonin there lies an authentic vestige of Haitian culture. Both Hugonin and Christophe have repressed their African and Caribbean heritages beneath a veneer of Frenchness with similarly tragic results. For Césaire, the task of the postcolonial writer is to synthesize these heritages.
The second play of Césaire's political triptych is Une Saison au Congo, which recounts the rise, fall, and assassination of Congolese political leader Patrice Lumumba. Published in 1965, the play recounts the Congo's declaration of independence from Belgian colonial rule, its rise to independence as Zaire under the leadership of Lumumba, and its neocolonial subjection under the ambitious but corrupt Mokutu, a thinly veiled portrayal of Mobutu Sésé Seko, the former president of Zaire. The play's topical nature affected its production history: as Davis reports, the Belgian authorities tried to suppress the production of the play, which was first staged in Brussels. Césaire's supporters among the intellectuals of Paris intervened and, according to Davis, "succeeded in circumventing these obstacles." When the play was staged in Paris under the direction of avant-garde director Serreau, Davis claims that it "provoked unease" among the "educated Zairean population."
The title of the play carries a double purpose: it makes clear that the true subject matter of the play is not simply that of the tragic hero Lumumba but the tragedy of the Congo and all of its people. Additionally, the title associates the Congo with hell through its allusion to Arthur Rimbaud's prose poem Une Saison en enfer (1873; translated as "A Season in Hell," 1931). Césaire introduces his audience to the Congo/ hell through Lumumba, who begins the play as a bonimenteur (beer seller). By beginning with the image of Lumumba selling beer, Césaire exploits the irony of politics as salesmanship. As he tells the audience that "le bock de bière est désormais le symbole de notre droit congolais et de nos libertés congolaises" (in the Congo a mug of beer is the symbol of all our rights and liberties), Lumumba emphasizes the artificial nature of rights under colonialism. Here, as in Une Tempête, Césaire emphasizes how colonizers bring the pleasures of alcohol, which is a means for keeping a subject population in its place. The introductory scene also foregrounds the gender politics of the play when a heckler cries that Polar Beer, the brand of beer Lumumba is selling, threatens to make men impotent. Lumumba's appeal to the women in the audience to disprove that claim underscores his masculine authority. The scene also introduces a sanza (mbira) player, who like a wandering Greek chorus figure, comments on events. For example, as the Belgian police watch Lumumba with concern, the sanza player, whom they dismiss as a "nuisance," sings "Ata-ndele" (Sooner or Later).
As the play depicts Lumumba's rise to power, it reveals the colonial and neocolonial forces working to undercut the Congo's bid for independence. Césaire uses poetic form to underscore the control colonial forces exercise over the fate of the newly independent state. In caricatures of a series of bankers, the dialogue moves into sustained rhymed couplets; in their speeches, the bankers make it clear that avarice and economic corruption will cause the downfall of the free Congo's leaders. In contrast, Lumumba's long monologue evoking the Congo as both mother and child, perhaps the most beautiful of the play, is written in lyrical free verse.
Césaire next exposes the false rhetoric of the "civilizing mission" the Belgian colonizers used to justify their appropriation of the Congo: the departing president reminds the crowd that King Leopold came to the Congo in the name of civilization rather than diamonds or gold mines. Then Césaire expands his critique of the colonizers to include both the ostensibly neutral forces of the United Nations, embodied in the character of Dag Hammarskjöld, and those of the "Ambassadeur Grand Occidental," a figure for American political power. The Ambassador justifies his country's authority through the belief that it is the watchdog of the world and has a particular mandate to guard against Communism. Underscoring the American role in the tragedy of the Congo, Césaire radicalizes the argument of the play, moving past the conflict between colonizer and colonized to mete out global culpability.
The last two acts of Une Saison au Congo chart the political fall of Lumumba and, ultimately, his murder. Act 2 demonstrates how rapidly Lumumba's authority is threatened by outside forces as well as by competition within the newly independent Congo. Lumumba is betrayed by those he trusts the most, especially his soldier and supporter Mokutu. He is also denied use of the radio to communicate with his people, which Césaire, like fellow Martinican intellectual and contributor to Présence africaine Fanon, identifies as central to the effectiveness of resistance movements. Having distributed the responsibility for Lumumba's downfall onto the range of forces established in act 1, in the third act Césaire has an unnamed white mercenary serve as Lumumba's murderer. At this juncture the play goes from being realistic to increasingly impressionistic. Hammarskjöld, Mokutu, and Lumumba's other enemies step onstage to admit their complicity in Lumumba's death.
The original edition of the play ends on a slightly optimistic note: the final moments take place at the Independence Day celebrations in Kinshasa. Although Mokutu, lacking Lumumba's natural eloquence, harangues the audience, it is the sanza player who has the last word, exhorting the newly independent nation, and its leaders, to "grow straight" and "to keep it clean." However, Césaire added a scene for the 1973 edition of the play in which Mokutu admits his betrayal of Lumumba and openly acknowledges his manipulation of the people of the newly independent Congo. This ending is much darker than the original. After Mokutu exhorts the crowd, he bids his soldiers to fire into the throng, killing the sanza player and others. As the smoke dissipates, Mokutu leaves the stage. With the new ending Césaire offers an increasingly skeptical perspective on neocolonial power: with the rise of the dictator, a new reign of terror has begun. Hence, Césaire's use of the indefinite article in the play's title, which corresponds to the indefinite article in the last play of Césaire's triptych, Une Tempête: Lumumba's rise and fall is just one season of many in the Congo's struggle for freedom, just as the "tempest" of the third play's title is only one storm of many in the history of colonial confrontation.
The title page of Une Tempête announces its revisionary relationship with Shakespeare's play The Tempest and its overturning of what Pallister calls the "master-slave dynamic" of that play: "d'après 'la Tempête' de Shakespeare--Adaptation pour un théâtre nègre" (according to The Tempest of Shakespeare--An Adaptation for Black Theater). Césaire's use of the phrase "black theater" is significant in its claim for a black transnational identity. The play makes reference to the postcolonial relations of the French Caribbean and the métropole; the postcolonial struggles of Africa; and the struggles of the Black Power and Civil Rights movements in the United States. With this play Césaire argues for a diasporic black identity that works to reverse the stifling binary of colonizer and colonized.
In contrast to Une Saison au Congo, which is largely realist in style, Une Tempête establishes itself as self-consciously theatrical from the beginning. Le Meneur du jeu (the Master of Ceremonies) enters the stage, inviting each actor to take up his own character and mask. Nature is identified as a vital character in the play, and the storm and the wind are invited to take up their own parts. By beginning the play in this manner, Césaire inverts the culture/nature dyad endemic to colonialism: not only are humans unable to control nature, but they are equal to nature as performers in the drama. Significantly, when Prospero enters the stage, he reminds Miranda that the shipwreck they are witnessing is only a play.
Césaire revises, racializes, and politicizes the relationships Shakespeare creates among Prospero, Ariel, and Caliban. Ariel is characterized as a mulatto slave, while Caliban is a black slave. By figuring Ariel as a mulatto, Césaire presents him as an ambivalent intermediary between white and black and colonizer and colonized, representing the position of the mulatto class in the Martinique of Césaire's upbringing. Caliban, on the other hand, is presented as a black nationalist: he enters the stage crying "Uhuru," the Swahili word for "freedom." Césaire depicts the relationship between Prospero and Caliban as analogous to that between the colonizer and colonized as portrayed in Une saison au Congo: Prospero congratulates himself for having given Caliban language, yet characterizes him as an ape. Caliban, however, understands the gift of language in an explicitly anticolonial and ironic manner: "Tu ne m'as rien appris du tout. Sauf, bien sûr, baragouiner ton langage pour comprende tes ordres" (You didn't teach me a thing. Except to jabber in your own language so that I could understand your orders).
Césaire introduces an element of environmental anticolonialism as well: Caliban says to Prospero, "tu crois que la terre est chose Mort . . . C'est tellement commode! Morte, alors on la piétine, on la souille, on la foule d'un pied vanqueur" (you think the earth is dead . . . it's so much simpler that way! Dead, you can walk on it, pollute it, you can tread upon it with the steps of a conqueror). As in Une Saison au Congo, in which Lumumba characterizes the Congo as both mother and child, here the land is both feminized and personified, and to respect the land implies a rejection of the patriarchal and hierarchical objectives of colonial power.
Where Shakespeare's play makes Prospero the sorcerer, in Césaire's play Caliban also has the powers of sorcery. Césaire presents Caliban as agent in the relationship rather than simply a slave: Prospero has given Caliban language, and Caliban teaches Prospero about the natural world of the island. Caliban is also linked with the destructive forces of nature, invoking the thunder god Shango to increase his power. The initial conflict between the two characters staged in act 1 concludes with Caliban's renunciation of his colonial identity and claiming the radical identity of black nationalism: "Appelle-moi X . . . l'homme dont on a volé le nom" (Call me X . . . a man whose history has been stolen). All of Caliban's dialogue with Prospero make use of tu, the familiar second-person pronoun, which means that Caliban addresses his ostensible master as an equal. Ariel, however, uses the vous form, underscoring his inability to reject his master and his liminal position between colonizer and colonized.
As the play progresses, Césaire further alters Shakespeare's original by demystifying the love relationship between Fernando and Miranda; Fernando cheats Miranda at cards, claiming that his deceptions will provide her a good introduction to the less innocent world she will encounter upon leaving the island. However, Fernando and Miranda disappear from the plot shortly before the play's conclusion.
Césaire continues emphasizing the play's racial politics with the Shakespearean fools Stephano and Trinculo, who both wish to turn Caliban into a museum piece and exhibit him in Europe. Such abuses not only happened during Shakespeare's lifetime, but throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries many colonial subjects had been turned into museum exhibits and freak shows. Finally, the play moves toward a reversal of the colonial binary. Prospero's staging of a performance of the Roman gods--ostensibly to instruct his daughter and future son-in-law in beauty and harmony--is disrupted by the entrance of the African god Eshu, the priapic trickster god who signifies reversal in ancient African cultures. Ultimately, Caliban and Prospero stay together on the island, but not until Caliban makes an impassioned speech for his freedom. As the play nears its close, Caliban and Prospero seem locked in unresolvable conflict, as Caliban damns the colonial enterprise, and Prospero vows to fight back. In the brief final speech, which occurs after the curtain is half-raised to indicate the passage of time, Prospero appears physically aged and weary. Despite his efforts to defend civilization on the island, it appears that nature is winning; the island is overrun with animals, and even the climate has changed. Just as Césaire begins the play by making storm and wind active characters in the drama, he ends the play by suggesting that nature has overwhelmed even the force of colonial power.
After 1970 Césaire published another volume of poetry, Moi, laminaire (1982, I, Laminary) and several more political and historical essays. In 1982 Mitterrand appointed him president of the regional council for the French départements d'outremer (Overseas Departments), a position that allowed him to encourage the economic and cultural development of his native Martinique. In 1993 he retired from national political life in Paris to Fort-de-France, Martinique, which acknowledged the island's debt to a great champion of its liberation and culture with a municipal celebration of his ninetieth birthday in 2003.
Pallister has stated that Aimé Césaire's writing "expresses the need for revolution, for change in a flawed and prejudiced world." All of his plays, especially the triptych, draw on history, African myth, and European literature to create a portrait of the Caribbean that both avows the damage done by capitalism and colonialism and underlines the difficulty of achieving liberation from this legacy. The latter problem is indicated in the fact that neither Césaire nor his characters choose to speak Creole in a sustained way. Additionally, each play offers a version of the postcolonial black male intellectual coming of age and taking responsibility for his people but hesitating to cut ties with France. Césaire's move from poet to dramatist at the time when he broke his ties with the Communist Party in the 1950s was motivated, in Davis's words, "by a sincere desire on his part to narrow the gap in communication between avant-garde writer and provincial audience," to reach the Martinican people with his vision of Caribbean civilization through a literary form more accessible than his poetry. Thus, Césaire's plays continue to be performed and studied as both political activism and popular theater.
— Meredith Goldsmith, Whitman College.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
PLAY PRODUCTIONS
La Tragedie du roi Christophe, Salzburg, Austria, Salzburg Festival, 4 August 1964.
Une Tempête, Hammamet, Festival d'Hammamet, Summer 1969.
Une Saison au Congo, Paris, Theater de l'Est, 4 October 1976.
BOOKS
Cahier d'un retour au pays natal, translated into Spanish by Lydia Cabrera as Retorno al país natal, preface by Benjamin Peret, illustrated by Wilfredo Lam (Havana: Molina y Cía, 1942); original French version (Paris: Brodas, 1947); Cahier d'un retour au pays natal: Memorandum on My Martinique, French and English edition, English translation by Lionel Abel and Ivan Goll, preface by André Breton (New York: Brentano's, 1947); definitive edition, preface by Petar Guberina (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1956).
Les Armes miraculeuses (Paris: Gallimard, 1946).
Soleil cou-coupé (Paris: Editions K, 1948).
Corps perdu, with illustrations by Pablo Picasso (Paris: Fragrance, 1950); translated by Clayton Eschleman and Annette Smith as Lost Body (New York: Braziller, 1986).
Discours sur le colonialisme (Paris: Réclame, 1950); translated by Joan Pinkham as Discourse on Colonialism (New York: Monthly Review, 1972).
Et les chiens se taisaient (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1956); translated by Eshleman and Smith as And the Dogs Were Silent, in Aimé Césaire: Lyric and Dramatic Poetry, 1946-1982 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1990), pp. 1-74.
Lettre Maurice Thorez, foreword by Alioune Diop (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1956).
Ferrements (Paris: Seuil, 1960).
Toussaint Louverture: La Révolution française et le problème colonial (Paris: Le Club français du livre, 1960); revised and enlarged edition, preface by Charles André Julien (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1962).
Cadastre (Paris: Seuil, 1961); translated by Emile Snyder and Sanford Upson, introduction by Snyder (New York: Third World Press, 1973).
La Tragédie du roi Christophe (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1963); translated by Ralph Manheim as The Tragedy of King Christophe ( New York: Grove, 1970).
Une Saison au Congo (Paris: Seuil, 1965); translated by Manheim as A Season in the Congo (New York: Grove, 1968; revised edition, Paris: Seuil, 1973).
Une Tempête, d'après "La tempête" de Shakespeare--Adaptation pour un théâtre nègre (Paris: Seuil, 1969); translated by Richard Miller as A Tempest, Based on Shakespeare's The Tempest--Adaptation for a Black Theatre (New York: Borchardt, 1985).
Moi, laminaire (Paris: Seuil, 1982).
EDITIONS AND COLLECTIONS
Aimé Césaire, écrivain martiniquais, edited by Monique and Simon Battestini (Paris: Nathan, 1967).
La Tragédie du roi Christophe (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1970).
OEuvres complètes, 3 volumes (Fort-de-France, Martinique: Editions Désormeaux, 1976)--comprises volume 1, Poésie; volume 2, Théâtre; and volume 3, OEuvre historique et politique.
Tropiques, by Césaire, René Ménil, and others, 2 volumes, edited by Césaire (Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 1978).
Et les chiens se taisaient (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1989).
La Poésie, edited by Daniel Maximin and Gilles Carpentier (Paris: Seuil, 1994).
EDITIONS IN ENGLISH
State of the Union: Poems, translated by Clayton Eshleman and Denis Kelly, Caterpillar, no. 1 (Bloomington, Ind. & Cleveland, Ohio: Asphodel Book Shop, 1966).
Aimé Césaire: The Collected Poetry, edited and translated by Eshleman and Annette Smith (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983).
Non-Vicious Circle: Twenty Poems of Aimé Césaire, translated and edited, with an introduction, by Gregson Davis (Stanford, Cal.: Stanford University Press, 1984).
Aimé Césaire: Lyric and Dramatic Poetry: 1946-82, translated by Eshleman and Smith (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1990).
A Tempest, Based on Shakespeare's The Tempest--Adaptation for a Black Theatre, translated by Philip Crispin (London: Oberon, 2000).
PRODUCED SCRIPT
Et les chiens se taisaient, radio, Radio France, 1956.
OTHER
"Poésie et connaissance," Tropiques, 12 (1945): 157-170.
Victor Schoelcher, Esclavage et colonisation, edited by Emile Tersen, introduction by Césaire (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1948).
Commémoration du centenaire de l'abolition de l'esclavage: Discours prononcés la Sorbonne, le 27 avril 1948, by Césaire and others, introduction by Edouard Depreux (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1948).
René Depestre, Végétations de clarté, preface by Césaire (Paris: Seghers, 1951).
"Décolonisation pour les Antilles," Présence africaine (April-May 1956): 7-12.
"Culture et colonisation," Présence africaine (September 1956): 190-205.
Daniel Guérin, Antilles décolonisées, preface by Césaire (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1956).
Sékou Touré, Expérience Guinéenne et unité africaine, preface by Césaire (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1959).
"L'Homme de culture et ses responsabilités," Présence africaine (March-April 1959): 116-122.
"Deuil aux Antilles," Présence africaine (Third Trimester 1962): 221-222.
"Société et littérature dans les Antilles," "Discours sur l'art africain," and "Esthéthique césairienne," Etudes littèraires, 6, no. 1 (1973): 9-20, 99-109, 111-112.
FURTHER READING
REFERENCES:
Lillian Pestre de Almaida, "Le Bestiaire symbolique dans Une Saison au Congo: Analyse stylistique des images zoomorphes dans la piece de Cesaire," Présence francophone, 13 (Fall 1976): 93-105.
Almaida, "Les Deux textes de Et les chiens se taisaient," OEuvres et critiques, 4 (Fall 1979): 203-211.
Albert James Arnold, Modernism and Negritude: The Poetry and Poetics of Aimé Césaire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981).
Charlotte Brow, "The Meaning of Caliban in Black Literature Today," Comparative Literature Studies, 13 (September 1976): 240-253.
Frederick Ivor Case, "Aimé Césaire et l'Occident chrétien," Esprit créateur, 10 (Fall 1970): 242-256.
Marc-A. Christophe, "Totalitarianism and Authoritarianism in Aimé Césaire's La Tragédie du roi Christophe," CLA Journal, 22 (1978): 31-45.
Guy Daninos, "Une Tempête de Césaire ou le prélude d'une nouvelle renaissance," Licorne, 9 (1985): 153-160.
Gregson Davis, Aimé Césaire (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
Hervé Fuyet and others, "Décolonisation et classes sociales dans La Tragédie du roi Christophe," French Review, 46 (May 1973): 1101-1106.
Clément Mbom, Le Théâtre d'Aimé Césaire, ou La primauté de l'universalité (Paris: Nathan, 1979).
Ernest Moutoussamy, Aimé Césaire: député l'Assemblé nationale, 1945-1993 (Paris: L'Harmattan, 1993).
Georges Ngal, Aimé Césaire, un homme la recherche d'une patrie (Dakar: Nouvelles éditions africaines, [1975]; republished, Paris: Présence Africaine, 1994).
Albert Owusu-Sarpong, Le Temps historique dans l'ouvre théâtrale d'Aimé Césaire (Sherbrooke, Quebec: Naaman, 1986; Paris: L'Harmattan, 2002).
Janis L. Pallister, Aimé Césaire (New York: Twayne, 1991).
Ernstpeter Ruhe, Aimé Césaire et Janheinz Jahn, les débuts du théâtre césairien: La nouvelle version de "Et les chiens se taisaient" (Würzburg, Germany: Königshausen & Neumann, 1990).
AIME CESAIRE, 1913-2008: IN CELEBRATION OF THE CENTENNIAL OF HIS BIRTH
(DOCUMENTARY MATERIAL: LECTURES, COMMENTARY AND INTERVIEWS ON VIDEO)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWrk9488094
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhE7X55QqPk&list=PL4B3F3932C54D12B7
ROBIN KELLEY ON THE PROFOUND LITERARY AND POLITICAL LEGACY OF AIME CESAIRE
(Interview on 'Democracy Now!'):
(Aime Cesaire-poet, politician, activist, 1913-2008)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dG8rvp0BmOg
Aimé Césaire - Discours sur le colonialisme (Discourse on colonialism):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mok1XYQ-p3Y
Aime Cesaire - YouTube Videos:
► 6:03
www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWrk9488094
Aug 30, 2008 - 6 min - Uploaded by zenadina
Philosopher extraodinaire from Martinique. One of the founding fathers of Negritude.
Aime Cesaire-poet, politician activist, 1913-2008 - YouTube
► 8:12
www.youtube.com/watch?v=dG8rvp0BmOg
Apr 22, 2008 - 8 min - Uploaded by IWantDemocracyNow
Aime Cesaire, 1913-2008: Remembering the Life and Legacy of the Black Pride Poet and Anti ...
Aimé Césaire - Discours sur le colonialisme - YouTube
► 10:55
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mok1XYQ-p3Y
Jun 29, 2008 - 11 min - Uploaded by ThysmLab
Hommage à Aimé Césaire, Discours sur le colonialisme.
Aimé Césaire - YouTube
► 3:11
www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6tBrVDNW1s
May 5, 2008 - 3 min - Uploaded by studiofarlando
Monsieur le Maire Aimé Césaire speaks candidly about his first encounter with Léopold Sédar ...
François Marthouret Lit Calendrier Lagunaire D' Aimé Césaire ...
► 2:36
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lrgn7efrqXM
Oct 8, 2012 - 3 min - Uploaded by Alexandre Litterae
François Marthouret Lit Calendrier Lagunaire D' Aimé Césaire - YouTube. Subscribe 1,600 ...
Aimé Césaire Euzhan Palcy AU RDV DE LA CONQUETE 1 - YouTube
► 3:01
www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0a3Y80lJdw
Sep 15, 2009 - 3 min - Uploaded by LaylaMetssitane
Coffret 3 DVDs Aimé Césaire : Une parole pour le 21ème siècle - A voice for 21st century par / by ...
A Season In The Congo by Aime Cesaire - YouTube
► 2:29
www.youtube.com/watch?v=ux7q8SUZtsw
Nov 26, 2012 - 2 min - Uploaded by Rico Speight
Excerpts from Aime Cesaire's A Season in the Congo, a mixed media, theatrical production ...
SEYNI & YELIBA "L'Ombre Gagne" (Aimé Césaire ... - YouTube
► 13:36
www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWJgM1CtiD0
Jul 2, 2013 - 14 min - Uploaded by reggaefromafrica
https://myspace.com/seyniyeliba Hommage à Aimé Césaire lors du Festival SENEFESTI, le 29 06 ...
Aimé Césaire - Cahier d'un retour au Pays natal - YouTube
► 66:30
www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhzk9rGl0rA
Jul 31, 2011 - 67 min - Uploaded by JudasSurLeMonde
Aimé Césaire - Cahier d'un retour au Pays natal ... Vidéo Ina Aimé CESAIRE, Léopold Sédar ...
Aimé Cesaire - YouTube
► 2:10
www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPkpjKUIq00
Nov 26, 2012 - 2 min - Uploaded by CameraoneTv
Moi nègre Parole de révolte Parole de ressentiment Sans doute Mais aussi parole de fidélité, Parole ...
Aimé Césaire
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Aimé Fernand David Césaire (26 June 1913 – 17 April 2008) was a Francophone poet, author and politician from Martinique. He was "one of the founders of the négritude movement in Francophone literature".[1]
Aimé Césaire was born in Basse-Pointe, Martinique, in 1913. He traveled to Paris to attend the Lycée Louis-le-Grand on an educational scholarship. In Paris, Césaire, who in 1935 passed an entrance exam for the École normale supérieure, created, with Léopold Sédar Senghor and Léon Damas, the literary review L'Étudiant Noir (The Black Student). In 1936, Césaire began work on his long poem Cahier d'un retour au pays natal, a vivid and powerful depiction of the ambiguities of Caribbean life and culture in the New World and this upon returning home to Martinique.
Césaire married fellow Martinican student Suzanne Roussi in 1937. Together they moved back to Martinique in 1939 with their young son. Césaire became a teacher at the Lycée Schoelcher in Fort-de-France, where he taught Frantz Fanon and served as an inspiration for, but did not teach, Édouard Glissant. Césaire would become a heavy influence for Fanon as both a mentor and a contemporary throughout Fanon's short life.
World War II
The years of World War II were ones of great intellectual activity for the Césaires. In 1941, Aimé Césaire and Suzanne Roussi founded the literary review Tropiques, with the help of other Martinican intellectuals such as René Ménil and Aristide Maugée, in order to challenge the cultural status quo and alienation that then characterized Martinican identity. Many run-ins with censorship did not deter Césaire from being an outspoken defendant of Martinican identity. He also became close to French surrealist poet André Breton, who spent time in Martinique during the war. (The two had met in 1940, and Breton would champion Cesaire's work.)[2]
In 1947, his book-length poem Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (Notebook of a Return to the Native Land), which had first appeared in the Parisian periodical Volontés in 1939 after rejection by a French book publisher,[3] was published.[4] The book mixes poetry and prose to express his thoughts on the cultural identity of black Africans in a colonial setting. Breton contributed a laudatory introduction to this 1947 edition, saying that the "poem is nothing less than the greatest lyrical monument of our times."[5]
Political career
In 1945, with the support of the French Communist Party (PCF), Césaire was elected mayor of Fort-de-France and deputy to the French National Assembly for Martinique. He was one of the principal drafters of the 1946 law on departmentalizing former colonies, a role for which independentist politicians have often criticized him.
Like many left intellectuals in France, Césaire looked in the 1930s and 1940s toward the Soviet Union as a source of human progress, virtue, and human rights, but Césaire later grew disillusioned with Communism. In 1956, after the Soviet Union's suppression of the Hungarian revolution, Aimé Césaire announced his resignation from the PCF in a text entitled Lettre à Maurice Thorez. In 1958 he founded the Parti Progressiste Martiniquais.
His writings during this period reflect his passion for civic and social engagement. He wrote Discours sur le colonialisme (Discourse on Colonialism) (1950; English translation 1953), a denunciation of European colonial racism, decadence, and hypocrisy that was republished in the French review Présence Africaine in 1955. In 1960, he published Toussaint Louverture, based on the life of the Haitian revolutionary. In 1968, he published the first version of Une Tempête, a radical adaptation of Shakespeare's play The Tempest for a black audience.
He served as President of the Regional Council of Martinique from 1983 to 1988. He retired from politics in 2001.
Later life
In 2006, he refused to meet the leader of the Union for a Popular Movement (UMP), Nicolas Sarkozy, then a probable contender for the 2007 presidential election, because the UMP had voted for the February 23, 2005 law asking teachers and textbooks to "acknowledge and recognize in particular the positive role of the French presence abroad, especially in North Africa", a law considered by many as a eulogy to colonialism and French actions during the Algerian War. President Jacques Chirac finally had the controversial law repealed.
On 9 April 2008, Césaire had serious heart troubles and was admitted to Pierre Zobda Quitman hospital in Fort-de-France. He died on 17 April 2008.[6]
Césaire was accorded the honour of a state funeral, held at the Stade de Dillon in Fort-de-France on April 20. President Nicolas Sarkozy was present but did not make a speech. Pierre Aliker, who served for many years as deputy mayor under Césaire, gave the funeral oration
Legacy
.
Martinique's airport at Le Lamentin was renamed Martinique Aimé Césaire International Airport on 15 January 2007. A national commemoration ceremony was held on 6 April 2011, as a plaque in Aimé Césaire's name was inaugurated in the Panthéon in Paris.[7]
Works
Each year links to its corresponding "[year] in poetry" article for poetry, or "[year] in literature" article for other works:
Poetry[edit]
1939: Cahier d'un retour au pays natal, Paris: Volontés, OCLC 213466273.
1946: Les armes miraculeuses, Paris: Gallimard, OCLC 248258485.
1947: Cahier d'un retour au pays natal, Paris: Bordas, OCLC 369684638.
1948: Soleil cou-coupé, Paris: K, OCLC 4325153.
1950: Corps perdu, Paris: Fragrance, OCLC 245836847.
1960: Ferrements, Paris: Editions du Seuil, OCLC 59034113.
1961: Cadastre, Paris: Editions du Seuil, OCLC 252242086.
1982: Moi, laminaire, Paris: Editions du Seuil, ISBN 978-2-02-006268-8.
1994: Comme un malentendu de salut ..., Paris: Editions du Seuil, ISBN 2-02-021232-3
Theatre[edit]
1958: Et les Chiens se taisaient, tragédie: arrangement théâtral. Paris: Présence Africaine; reprint: 1997.
1963: La Tragédie du roi Christophe. Paris: Présence Africaine; reprint: 1993; The Tragedy of King Christophe, New York: Grove, 1969.
1969: Une Tempête, adapted from The Tempest by William Shakespeare: adaptation pour un théâtre nègre. Paris: Seuil; reprint: 1997; A Tempest, New York: Ubu repertory, 1986.
1966: Une Saison au Congo. Paris: Seuil; reprint: 2001; A Season in the Congo, New York, 1968 (a play about Patrice Lumumba).
Other writings[edit]
"Poésie et connaissance", Tropiques (12), January 1945: 158–70.
Discours sur le colonialisme, Paris: Présence Africaine, 1955, OCLC 8230845.
Lettre à Maurice Thorez, Paris: Présence Africaine, 1957 [24 October 1956].[8]
Toussaint Louverture: La Révolution française et le problème colonial, Paris: Club français du livre, 1960, OCLC 263448333.
See also[edit]
France portal
Caribbean portal
Biography portal
Poetry portal
Créolité
Antillanité
Notes[edit]
Jump up ^ Ben A. Heller "Césaire, Aimé", in Daniel Balderston et al. (eds.) Encyclopedia of Latin American and Caribbean Literature, 1900-2003, London: Routledge, p.128-30, 128.
Jump up ^ Auster, Paul, editor, The Random House Book of Twentieth-Century French Poetry: with Translations by American and British Poets, New York: Random House, 1982. ISBN 0-394-52197-8
Jump up ^ "Aimé Césaire", in Donald E. Herdeck (ed.), Caribbean Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical-Critical Encyclopedia, Washington, DC: Three Continents Press, 1979, p.324.
Jump up ^ "Commentary." Notebook of a Return to the Native Land (Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2001), p. 53.
Jump up ^ "A Great Black Poet." Notebook of a Return to the Native Land (Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2001), p. xiii.
Jump up ^ "Caribbean poet Cesaire dies at 94". BBC. 2008-04-17. Archived from the original on 18 April 2008. Retrieved 2008-04-17.
Jump up ^ Décret du 16 mars 2011 décidant d'un hommage de la Nation à Aimé Césaire au Panthéon, JORF No. 64, 17 mars 2011, p. 4839, texte No. 37, NOR MCCB1105232D, sur Légifrance.
Jump up ^ "Lettre à Maurice Thorez". Collectif: Les Mots Sont Importants. 2008-04-18. Retrieved 2011-03-10.
References[edit]
Césaire, Aimé (1957). Letter to Maurice Thorez. Paris: Présence africaine. p. 7.
Césaire, Aimé. Notebook of a Return to the Native Land. Trans./eds. Clayton Eshleman and Annete Smith, with an introduction by André Breton. Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2001.
Christian Filostrat, "La Négritude et la 'Conscience raciale et révolutionaire sociale' d'Aimé Césaire". Présence Francophone, No 21, Automne 1980. pp 119–130.
Joubert, Jean-Louis. "Césaire, Aimé." In Dictionnaire encyclopédique de la littérature française. Paris: Robert Laffont, 1999.
Malela, Buata, "Le rebelle ou la quête de la liberté chez Aimé Césaire", Revue Frontenac Review, 16-17, Queen’s University, Kingston (Ontario), 2003, p. 125-148.
Malela, Buata, "Les enjeux de la figuration de Lumumba. Débat postcolonial et discours en contrepoint chez Césaire et Sartre", Mouvements, n° 51, 2007/3, p. 130-141.
Malela, Buata B., Les écrivains afro-antillais à Paris (1920–1960). Stratégies et postures identitaires. Paris, Karthala, coll. Lettres du Sud, 2008.
Malela, Buata B., Aimé Césaire. Le fil et la trame: critique et figuration de la colonialité du pouvoir. Paris, Anibwe, 2009.
Ojo-Ade, Femi, Aimé Césaire's African Theater: Of poets, prophets and politicians, Africa World Press, Inc., 2010.
External links[edit]
Aime Cesaire, biography, by Brooke Ritz, Postcolonial Studies website, English Department, Emory University. 1999.
Aimé Césaire, bibliography, biography, and links (in French), "île en île", City University of New York, 1998-2004.
Aimé Césaire, biography and bibliography, Pegasos literature related resources, 2002.
Khalid Chraibi, an interview with Aimé Césaire, (in French) on occasion of the Paris première of "La Tragédie du Roi Christophe" in 1965.
Official tribute site to Aimé Césaire.
"Out of Defeat: Aimé Césaire's Miraculous Words". Tribute by Colin Dayan.
Aime Cesaire, 1913-2008: Remembering the Life and Legacy - video report by Democracy Now!.
Aimé Césaire, by Mabogo Percy More, May 2008.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Aimé Fernand David Césaire (26 June 1913 – 17 April 2008) was a Francophone poet, author and politician from Martinique. He was "one of the founders of the négritude movement in Francophone literature".[1]
Aimé Césaire was born in Basse-Pointe, Martinique, in 1913. He traveled to Paris to attend the Lycée Louis-le-Grand on an educational scholarship. In Paris, Césaire, who in 1935 passed an entrance exam for the École normale supérieure, created, with Léopold Sédar Senghor and Léon Damas, the literary review L'Étudiant Noir (The Black Student). In 1936, Césaire began work on his long poem Cahier d'un retour au pays natal, a vivid and powerful depiction of the ambiguities of Caribbean life and culture in the New World and this upon returning home to Martinique.
Césaire married fellow Martinican student Suzanne Roussi in 1937. Together they moved back to Martinique in 1939 with their young son. Césaire became a teacher at the Lycée Schoelcher in Fort-de-France, where he taught Frantz Fanon and served as an inspiration for, but did not teach, Édouard Glissant. Césaire would become a heavy influence for Fanon as both a mentor and a contemporary throughout Fanon's short life.
World War II
The years of World War II were ones of great intellectual activity for the Césaires. In 1941, Aimé Césaire and Suzanne Roussi founded the literary review Tropiques, with the help of other Martinican intellectuals such as René Ménil and Aristide Maugée, in order to challenge the cultural status quo and alienation that then characterized Martinican identity. Many run-ins with censorship did not deter Césaire from being an outspoken defendant of Martinican identity. He also became close to French surrealist poet André Breton, who spent time in Martinique during the war. (The two had met in 1940, and Breton would champion Cesaire's work.)[2]
In 1947, his book-length poem Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (Notebook of a Return to the Native Land), which had first appeared in the Parisian periodical Volontés in 1939 after rejection by a French book publisher,[3] was published.[4] The book mixes poetry and prose to express his thoughts on the cultural identity of black Africans in a colonial setting. Breton contributed a laudatory introduction to this 1947 edition, saying that the "poem is nothing less than the greatest lyrical monument of our times."[5]
Political career
In 1945, with the support of the French Communist Party (PCF), Césaire was elected mayor of Fort-de-France and deputy to the French National Assembly for Martinique. He was one of the principal drafters of the 1946 law on departmentalizing former colonies, a role for which independentist politicians have often criticized him.
Like many left intellectuals in France, Césaire looked in the 1930s and 1940s toward the Soviet Union as a source of human progress, virtue, and human rights, but Césaire later grew disillusioned with Communism. In 1956, after the Soviet Union's suppression of the Hungarian revolution, Aimé Césaire announced his resignation from the PCF in a text entitled Lettre à Maurice Thorez. In 1958 he founded the Parti Progressiste Martiniquais.
His writings during this period reflect his passion for civic and social engagement. He wrote Discours sur le colonialisme (Discourse on Colonialism) (1950; English translation 1953), a denunciation of European colonial racism, decadence, and hypocrisy that was republished in the French review Présence Africaine in 1955. In 1960, he published Toussaint Louverture, based on the life of the Haitian revolutionary. In 1968, he published the first version of Une Tempête, a radical adaptation of Shakespeare's play The Tempest for a black audience.
He served as President of the Regional Council of Martinique from 1983 to 1988. He retired from politics in 2001.
Later life
In 2006, he refused to meet the leader of the Union for a Popular Movement (UMP), Nicolas Sarkozy, then a probable contender for the 2007 presidential election, because the UMP had voted for the February 23, 2005 law asking teachers and textbooks to "acknowledge and recognize in particular the positive role of the French presence abroad, especially in North Africa", a law considered by many as a eulogy to colonialism and French actions during the Algerian War. President Jacques Chirac finally had the controversial law repealed.
On 9 April 2008, Césaire had serious heart troubles and was admitted to Pierre Zobda Quitman hospital in Fort-de-France. He died on 17 April 2008.[6]
Césaire was accorded the honour of a state funeral, held at the Stade de Dillon in Fort-de-France on April 20. President Nicolas Sarkozy was present but did not make a speech. Pierre Aliker, who served for many years as deputy mayor under Césaire, gave the funeral oration
Legacy
.
Martinique's airport at Le Lamentin was renamed Martinique Aimé Césaire International Airport on 15 January 2007. A national commemoration ceremony was held on 6 April 2011, as a plaque in Aimé Césaire's name was inaugurated in the Panthéon in Paris.[7]
Works
Each year links to its corresponding "[year] in poetry" article for poetry, or "[year] in literature" article for other works:
Poetry[edit]
1939: Cahier d'un retour au pays natal, Paris: Volontés, OCLC 213466273.
1946: Les armes miraculeuses, Paris: Gallimard, OCLC 248258485.
1947: Cahier d'un retour au pays natal, Paris: Bordas, OCLC 369684638.
1948: Soleil cou-coupé, Paris: K, OCLC 4325153.
1950: Corps perdu, Paris: Fragrance, OCLC 245836847.
1960: Ferrements, Paris: Editions du Seuil, OCLC 59034113.
1961: Cadastre, Paris: Editions du Seuil, OCLC 252242086.
1982: Moi, laminaire, Paris: Editions du Seuil, ISBN 978-2-02-006268-8.
1994: Comme un malentendu de salut ..., Paris: Editions du Seuil, ISBN 2-02-021232-3
Theatre[edit]
1958: Et les Chiens se taisaient, tragédie: arrangement théâtral. Paris: Présence Africaine; reprint: 1997.
1963: La Tragédie du roi Christophe. Paris: Présence Africaine; reprint: 1993; The Tragedy of King Christophe, New York: Grove, 1969.
1969: Une Tempête, adapted from The Tempest by William Shakespeare: adaptation pour un théâtre nègre. Paris: Seuil; reprint: 1997; A Tempest, New York: Ubu repertory, 1986.
1966: Une Saison au Congo. Paris: Seuil; reprint: 2001; A Season in the Congo, New York, 1968 (a play about Patrice Lumumba).
Other writings[edit]
"Poésie et connaissance", Tropiques (12), January 1945: 158–70.
Discours sur le colonialisme, Paris: Présence Africaine, 1955, OCLC 8230845.
Lettre à Maurice Thorez, Paris: Présence Africaine, 1957 [24 October 1956].[8]
Toussaint Louverture: La Révolution française et le problème colonial, Paris: Club français du livre, 1960, OCLC 263448333.
See also[edit]
France portal
Caribbean portal
Biography portal
Poetry portal
Créolité
Antillanité
Notes[edit]
Jump up ^ Ben A. Heller "Césaire, Aimé", in Daniel Balderston et al. (eds.) Encyclopedia of Latin American and Caribbean Literature, 1900-2003, London: Routledge, p.128-30, 128.
Jump up ^ Auster, Paul, editor, The Random House Book of Twentieth-Century French Poetry: with Translations by American and British Poets, New York: Random House, 1982. ISBN 0-394-52197-8
Jump up ^ "Aimé Césaire", in Donald E. Herdeck (ed.), Caribbean Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical-Critical Encyclopedia, Washington, DC: Three Continents Press, 1979, p.324.
Jump up ^ "Commentary." Notebook of a Return to the Native Land (Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2001), p. 53.
Jump up ^ "A Great Black Poet." Notebook of a Return to the Native Land (Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2001), p. xiii.
Jump up ^ "Caribbean poet Cesaire dies at 94". BBC. 2008-04-17. Archived from the original on 18 April 2008. Retrieved 2008-04-17.
Jump up ^ Décret du 16 mars 2011 décidant d'un hommage de la Nation à Aimé Césaire au Panthéon, JORF No. 64, 17 mars 2011, p. 4839, texte No. 37, NOR MCCB1105232D, sur Légifrance.
Jump up ^ "Lettre à Maurice Thorez". Collectif: Les Mots Sont Importants. 2008-04-18. Retrieved 2011-03-10.
References[edit]
Césaire, Aimé (1957). Letter to Maurice Thorez. Paris: Présence africaine. p. 7.
Césaire, Aimé. Notebook of a Return to the Native Land. Trans./eds. Clayton Eshleman and Annete Smith, with an introduction by André Breton. Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2001.
Christian Filostrat, "La Négritude et la 'Conscience raciale et révolutionaire sociale' d'Aimé Césaire". Présence Francophone, No 21, Automne 1980. pp 119–130.
Joubert, Jean-Louis. "Césaire, Aimé." In Dictionnaire encyclopédique de la littérature française. Paris: Robert Laffont, 1999.
Malela, Buata, "Le rebelle ou la quête de la liberté chez Aimé Césaire", Revue Frontenac Review, 16-17, Queen’s University, Kingston (Ontario), 2003, p. 125-148.
Malela, Buata, "Les enjeux de la figuration de Lumumba. Débat postcolonial et discours en contrepoint chez Césaire et Sartre", Mouvements, n° 51, 2007/3, p. 130-141.
Malela, Buata B., Les écrivains afro-antillais à Paris (1920–1960). Stratégies et postures identitaires. Paris, Karthala, coll. Lettres du Sud, 2008.
Malela, Buata B., Aimé Césaire. Le fil et la trame: critique et figuration de la colonialité du pouvoir. Paris, Anibwe, 2009.
Ojo-Ade, Femi, Aimé Césaire's African Theater: Of poets, prophets and politicians, Africa World Press, Inc., 2010.
External links[edit]
Aime Cesaire, biography, by Brooke Ritz, Postcolonial Studies website, English Department, Emory University. 1999.
Aimé Césaire, bibliography, biography, and links (in French), "île en île", City University of New York, 1998-2004.
Aimé Césaire, biography and bibliography, Pegasos literature related resources, 2002.
Khalid Chraibi, an interview with Aimé Césaire, (in French) on occasion of the Paris première of "La Tragédie du Roi Christophe" in 1965.
Official tribute site to Aimé Césaire.
"Out of Defeat: Aimé Césaire's Miraculous Words". Tribute by Colin Dayan.
Aime Cesaire, 1913-2008: Remembering the Life and Legacy - video report by Democracy Now!.
Aimé Césaire, by Mabogo Percy More, May 2008.
