Aimé Césaire

Aimé Césaire was born in Basse-Pointe, Martinique, French Caribbean, in 1913. His father was a tax inspector, and his mother was a dressmaker. He was a lower class citizen but still learned to read and write.[5] His family moved to the capital of Martinique, Fort-de-France, in order for Césaire to attend the only secondary school on the island, Lycée Victor Schœlcher.[6] He considered himself of Igbo descent from Nigeria, and considered his first name Aimé a retention of an Igbo name; though the name is of French origin, ultimately from the Old French word amée, meaning beloved, its pronunciation is similar to the Igbo eme, which forms the basis for many Igbo given names.[7] Césaire traveled to Paris to attend the Lycée Louis-le-Grand on an educational scholarship. In Paris, he passed the entrance exam for the École Normale Supérieure in 1935 and created the literary review L'Étudiant noir (The Black Student) with Léopold Sédar Senghor and Léon Damas.[lower-alpha 1] Manifestos by these three students in its third number (May–June 1935)[8] initiated the Négritude movement later substantial in both pan-Africanist theory and the actual decolonization of the French Empire in Africa. In 1934 Césaire was invited to the Kingdom of Yugoslavia by his friend Petar Guberina where in Šibenik he started writing his poem “Notebook of a Return to the Native Land”, which was one of the first expressions of the concept of Négritude.[9] Upon returning home to Martinique in 1936, Césaire began work on his long poem Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (Notebook of a Return to the Native Land), a vivid and powerful depiction of the ambiguities of Caribbean life and culture in the New World.

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, becoming a great influence for Fanon as both a mentor and contemporary.[10] Césaire also served as an inspiration for, but did not teach, writer Édouard Glissant.

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 characterized Martinican identity at the time. In this sense, according to Ursula Heise, the publications of the French botanist Henri Stehlé in Tropiques in the early 1940's, concerning the Martinican flora,[11] and "the invocations of Césaire to the Antillean ecology operate as indices of a racial and cultural authenticity which is distinguished from European identity...".[12] During an interview granted in 1978, Césaire explains that his aim for including these articles in Tropiques was "to allow Martinique to refocus" and "to lead Martinicans to reflect" on their close environment.[13] Césaire's many run-ins with censorship did not deter him, however, from being an outspoken defendant of Martinican identity.[14] 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 later would champion Cesaire's work.[15]

In 1947, his book-length poem Cahier d'un retour au pays natal, which had first appeared in the Parisian periodical Volontés in 1939 after rejection by a French book publisher,[16] was published.[17] The book mixes poetry and prose to express Césaire's 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."[18] When asked by René Depestre about his writing style, Césaire replied by saying that "Surrealism provided me with what I had been confusedly searching for."[19]

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 managed to get a law addressing departmentalization approved unanimously on 19 March 1946.[20] While departmentalization was implemented in 1946, the status did not bring many meaningful changes to the people of Martinique.

Like many left-wing intellectuals in 1930s and 1940s France, Césaire looked toward the Soviet Union as a source of progress, virtue, and human rights. He later grew disillusioned with the Soviet Union after the 1956 suppression of the Hungarian revolution. He announced his resignation from the PCF in a text entitled Lettre à Maurice Thorez (Letter to Maurice Thorez).[21] In 1958 Césaire founded the Parti Progressiste Martiniquais. With the Parti Progressiste Martiniquais, he dominated the island’s political scene for the last half of the century. Césaire declined to renew his mandate as deputy in the National Assembly in 1993, after a 47-year continuous term.[20]

His writings during this period reflect his passion for civic and social engagement. He wrote Discours sur le colonialisme (Discourse on Colonialism), a denunciation of European colonial racism, decadence, and hypocrisy that was republished in the French review Présence Africaine in 1955 (English translation 1957). In 1960, he published Toussaint Louverture, based on the life of the Haitian revolutionary. In 1969, he published the first version of Une Tempête, a radical adaptation of Shakespeare's play The Tempest for a black audience.

Césaire 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, a probable contender at the time for the 2007 presidential election, because the UMP had voted for the 2005 French law on colonialism. This law required 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.[22]

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.[23]

Césaire was accorded the honor of a state funeral, held at the Stade de Dillon in Fort-de-France on 20 April. French President Nicolas Sarkozy was present but did not make a speech. The honor of making the funeral oration was left to his old friend Pierre Aliker, who had served for many years as deputy mayor under Césaire.[24]

Cadastre (1961) and Moi, laminaire (1982)

Each year links to its corresponding "[year] in poetry" article for poetry, or "[year] in literature" article for other works:

• Créolité
• Antillanité
• Octave Mannoni

• Dukats, Mara L. "The hybrid terrain of literary imagination: Maryse Conde's Black Witch of Salem, Nathaniel Hawthorne's Hester Prynne, and Aime Cesaire's heroic poetic voice." College Literature 22, no. 1 (1995): 51-61.

Wikiquote has quotations related to Aimé Césaire.

• 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.
• Petri Liukkonen. "Aimé Césaire". Books and Writers.
• 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. Archived 8 February 2011 at the Wayback Machine
• "Out of Defeat: Aimé Césaire's Miraculous Words". Tribute by Colin Dayan, September/October 2008.
• Aime Cesaire, 1913-2008: Remembering the Life and Legacy - video report by Democracy Now!, 21 April 2008.
• Aimé Césaire, by Mabogo Percy More, May 2008.