Thanksgiving For Aime Cesaire

... when my turn comes into the air, I will raise up a cry so violent
that I will spatter the sky utterly, and by my shredded branches
and by the insolent jet of my solemn wounded bole
I shall command the islands to exist
- from “Lost Body”, by Aimé Césaire, trans. E. Anthony Hurley

One of the greatest sins of the European colonial enterprise in the Caribbean was the institutionalized separation of the enslaved Africans and the different ideologies that influenced relations between the Africans and the Europeans during the era of plantation slavery. This still rears its head, sometimes in contradictory ways when the colonized boast of their acumen with the languages of the colonizers that are also used to define their identities. In Anguilla for example, I have heard it said with pride, “I got my Dutch rights” or “I French – I born South.” On the other side, Anguillians call our cousins from the Dominican Republic, Spanish but strangely enough, we do not refer to ourselves as English. These were the sorts of issues brought to the fore in the life and work of Aimé Césaire, a proud African son who was born in Martinique in 1913 and who died there at age 94 on April 17, 2008.
Aimé Fernand Césaire was a poet, a writer of poetic prose, a playwright and a politician. In 1945 he was elected Mayor of Fort de France and served as one of Martinique’s Deputies in the French National Assembly for over fifty years. This was not surprising though, “given the Latin/French ideology of assimilation as compared to the Germanic ideology of racial separation of the British.” This is perhaps why in the French colonial arrangements matters of nationality and citizenship were treated differently to those of the British. However, the assimilation remains questionable as periodic unrest among migrant, mostly African youths in France is still attributed to racism. Aimé Césaire was one of those when he arrived in Paris in 1931 and with fellow-students Léopold Sédar Senghor of Senegal and Léon Damas of Cayenne/French Guiana, created a literary review called “L’Étudiant noir” (The Black Student), a magazine of Black culture and politics. These three developed the concept which came to be called négritude, which was an “affirmation that one is Black and proud of it.” No, it was not James Brown who conceptualized that anthem of the 60s. He just made it popular.
Négritude became more than a concept. It became a movement to unite the people’s of the African Diaspora and was a response to the racism in France and that turned the French equivalent of the derogatory term nigger, “into a positively connoted celebration of African culture and character.” Senghor, who was also a poet, cultural theorist and politician, based his cultural theory and political career on the guiding principle of négritude. Senghor’s first collection of poems, “Chants D’Ombre” with themes of exile and nostalgia, was published in 1945. Fifteen years later, in 1960 Senghor was elected the first president of Senegal. Damas, the third poet of the triumvate, had met Césaire when he attended secondary school in Martinique and they shared a lifelong friendship. The Black Student was the voice of the new movement and in one editorial, Damas wrote that the Black students from the French colonies “suffered common feelings of alienation, exile and nostalgia for Africa.” Dumas was the first of the three to publish a volume of poetry, entitled “Pigments” in 1937, preceding Césaire’s “Notebook” by two years. Césaire’s major work “Return to My Native Land” is a 1,000 line poem first published in French in 1939. Kesteloot tells us that it caused a sensation, which like Damas’ “Pigments”, made “a direct hit on the African continent as well as on the intellectuals in the Antilles, and even those of Anglophone or Lusophone [Portuguese-speaking] Africa. The word Négritude first appeared in that poem and “incited an entire generation of post-colonial writers and minds, in both the Caribbean world and on the African continent.”
In his own commentary on négritude, Césaire explained “The West told us that in order to be universal we had to start by denying that we were black. I, on the contrary, said to myself that the more we were black, the more universal we would be. It was a totally different approach. It was not a choice between alternatives, but an effort at reconciliation.” Other sources cite Césaire thus, “No race possesses the monopoly of beauty, intelligence and force, and there is room for all of us at the rendezvous of victory.” These were the thoughts that reverberated in South Africa’s Steve Biko who is associated with the same concept, in the context of apartheid dubbed, Black Consciousness. Césaire therefore argued in favour of cross-cultural fertilization. Jan Carew bears this out as follows: “A civilization that withdraws into itself atrophies; that for civilizations, exchange is oxygen; that the great good fortune of Europe is to have been a crossroads, and that because it was…the receptacle of all philosophies, the meeting place of all sentiments, it was the best center for the redistribution of energy.” I would argue similarly for the Caribbean civilizations. However, Carew referring to Césaire as “the doyen of modern poets from the Antilles” reminds us that “in order to deal objectively with what colonialism is, it is necessary to agree on what it is not: neither evangelization, nor a philanthropic enterprise, nor a desire to push back the frontiers of ignorance, disease and tyranny, nor a project undertaken for the greater glory of God, nor an attempt to extend the rule of law.” It may do Anguillians a world of good to search out Aimé Césaire’s Discours sur le colonialism (Discourse on Colonialism) published in 1950 to help us understand what independence must and must not be.
It was when World War II ended in 1945 that Césaire was first elected Mayor of Fort-de-France and in 1946 he won a seat to represent Martinique in the French National Assembly. It seems as though the people were quite content to have him occupy these positions for life as he continued to serve as Mayor up to 1983 and finally retired from politics in 1993 at age 80. Césaire had left Martinique’s Communist Party in 1957 to form the Parti Progressiste Martiniquais (PPM). The PPM did not call for independence but opted for self-rule and Césaire helped his island attain this status that saw Martinique moving from a colony to an overseas department of France, heavily subsidized by its administering power. Thanks to Césaire Martinique today has a high standard of living but my sentiments lie with James Ferguson, who describes it as a “first-world enclave in the Caribbean, eyed enviously yet condescendingly by its poorer but independent neighbours.”

Though his politics rendered him radical more so than revolutionary, Césaire is a name cannot come to mind without those of C. L. R. James and Frantz Fanon. The latter, I still struggle to read, the former, a hero whose “Black Jacobins” can be contrasted with Césaire’s play, “The Tragedy of King Christophe”. Christophe’s tyranny was real but the Haitian Revolution was not a failure. We can understand why the French think of Césaire as theirs and last year French President Nicolas Sarkozy campaigned successfully for Martinique’s airport to be renamed in honor of Césaire. When Césaire passed away two weeks ago, President Sarkozy paid tribute, saying, “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… Through his universal call for the respect of human dignity, consciousness and responsibility, he will remain a symbol of hope for all oppressed peoples.”

This is why I give thanks for the life and work of Aimé Césaire.