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Table of Contents
Aimé Césaire & René Depestre, "On Negritude"
Graffiti of Aimé Césaire
by jehpuh,CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
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“There were things to tell the world. We were not dazzled by European civilization. We bore the imprint of European civilization but we thought that Africa could make a contribution to Europe,” (54) |
Key ideas & commentary
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Biography of Aimé Césaire
Aimé Césaire was a poet and influential politician from Martinique who lived from 1913 to 2008. As many influential postcolonialists from the French colonies, he was educated in Paris and got engaged in the political scene of Martinique after the Second World War.
According to the Encyclopedia Brittanica, he became a member of government on behalf of Martinique, joined the Communist Party, and fell in love with surrealism as a tool to liberate himself from traditional colonial uses of language. This newfound expression led him to poem against the colonial regime and in favor of a free African Martinique. This use of poetry and surrounding movement became the backbone for the Negritude movement.
Later in life (circa 1963), he switched his preferred method of literary creation from poems to theatrical productions, and from Negritude to Black Militantism. His two plays, La Tragédie du Roi Christophe (1963) and Une Saison au Congo (1966) are unapologetically political tragedies which show the overlying motif of the black power movement in Africa always ending in failure.
Biography of René Depestre
René Depestre is a currently living (aged 98) Haitian-French poet. He was born in 1926, and from the age of 10 was raised by his maternal grandmother. He was a communist and an activist against French colonialism. Although Haiti and the Caribbean are central to his work, he lived in exile in Cuba and has settled in France. According to his biography on Wikipedia, “One of his most famous collections of poetry is Un arc-en-ciel pour l'Occident chrétien (Rainbow for the Christian Occident) (1967), a mix of politics, eroticism, and Voudoo, topics that are found in all of his works.” These themes can be seen in works that are available online, including the political in Mère Caraïbe / Caribbean Mother, and Hàïti a la dérive / Haiti Adrift; the erotic in The Enchantment of a Rainy Hour; and a fusion of all three in Hadriana in all my dreams : a novel.
References on Negritude:
- 1994 interview with Aimé Césaire (in French) "La Négritude" Archive INA (Use YouTube auto-translation to watch with captions in English)
