By Astrid Wendlandt
Thu Apr 17,
8:52 AM ET PARIS (Reuters) -

French Caribbean poet Aime Cesaire,founding father of the "negritude" movement thatcelebrated black consciousness, died in his native Martinique, the France's Ministry of Culture said on Thursday. Cesaire, 94, who was mayor of the island's main cityFort-de-France for more than half a century, was admitted to hospital last week suffering from heartand other problems. His writings offered insight into how France imposedits culture on its citizens of different origins inthe early part of the 20th Century. The theme still resonates in French politics today, asthe country continues to struggle to integrate many ofits residents of African and North African origin. In 2005, Cesaire refused to meet then French InteriorMinister Nicolas Sarkozy (now French president) overconcerns that Sarkozy's conservative UMP party hadpushed for a law which proposed to recognize thepositive legacy of French colonial rule.

The law waseventually repealed. Cesaire and African intellectual Leopold Senghor --later president of Senegal -- founded "The BlackStudent" in 1934, a journal that encouraged people todevelop black identity. ANTI-COLONIAL VOICE IN THE 1960s The Caribbean writer rose to fame with his "Notebookof a Return to the Native Land," written in the late1930s, in which he says "my negritude is neither towernor cathedral, it plunges into the red flesh of thesoil." His poems expressed the degradation of black people inthe Caribbean and describe the rediscovery of anAfrican sense of self. In his "Discourse onColonialism," first published in 1950, Cesairecompared the relationship between the colonizer andcolonized with the Nazis and their victims.

He was a mentor to fellow Martinican author FrantzFanon, and their anti-colonial writings were a majorinfluence in the heady intellectual climate of the1960s and 1970s in France. The negritude movement was a counterpart to the BlackPride movement in the United States, though it hasbeen criticized for not being radical enough. Cesaire was also a friend of the French surrealistpoet Andre Breton who had encouraged him to become amajor voice of Surrealism. Cesaire's anti-colonial rhetoric did not prevent himfrom having a long-lasting political career. After becoming mayor of Fort-de-France in 1945 at theage of 32, he was elected deputy of parliament a yearlater, a post he held until the early 1990s.

A graduate of the prestigious French Ecole NormaleSuperieure -- unusual for a black Martinican in the1930s -- he remained a member of the French communistparty until the Soviet Hungarian repression of 1956. Cesaire was born in 1913 in the small town ofBasse-Pointe in Martinique. He married Suzanne Roussiin 1937, a gifted writer in her own right, with whomhe had six children.

(Reporting by Astrid Wendlandt; editing by Geert DeClercq and Paul Casciato)

Rest In Peace.

The liberating power of words - interview with poet Aime Cesaire - Interview

UNESCO Courier, May, 1997 by Annick Thebia Melsan

Aime Cesaire, who was born in Martinique in 1913, is one of this century's major writers. In his poetry, plays and political activities he has waged a lifelong struggle to restore dignity to colonized peoples. First and foremost a poet, here he talks to Annick Thebia Melsan about his faith in the power of words.

* The usual way of trying to place you is by reference to various things such as time and place, writing, poetry and its different categories, political action and so on, but how would you place yourself?

Aime Cesaire: That's a terribly difficult question to answer but, well, I'm a man, a man from Martinique, a coloured man, a black, someone from a particular country, from a particular geographical background, someone with a history who has fought for a specific cause. It's not very original but, broadly speaking, my answer would be that history will say who I am.

* You are from the north of Martinique. . . .

A.C.: I've always had the feeling that I was on a quest to reconquer something, my name, my country or myself.

That is why my approach has in essence always been poetic.

Because it seems to me that in a way that's what poetry is.

The reconquest of the self by the self.

* And what is your preferred instrument for that purpose?

A. C.: I think words are the essential instrument!

For a painter it would be painting! For a poet it is words!

I think it was Heidegger who said that words are the abode of being. There are many such quotations. I believe it was Rene Char, in his surrealist days, who said that words know much more about us than we know about them.

I too believe that words have a revealing as well as a creative function.

* Revealing, creative . . . exploratory, perhaps?

A.C.: Exploratory is very well put: It's the plummet dropped in the water, the homing device that brings the self back up to the surface.

* You have often said that the black person's first words, after the tong years of silence, are bound to be revolutionary words. Does that mean that poetry is "revolutionary" as well?

A.C.: Yes, it is revolutionary because it is the world turned upside down, ploughed up, transmuted.

When the review Tropiques came out in Martinique under the occupation in 1941, in the middle of the world war, like a plunge into the contradictory wellsprings of the West Indian soul, a stark glimpse into the depths of colonial alienation, it was truly a cultural revolution.

And when the Vichy censor banned Tropiques in 1941 with the comment that it was revolutionary, he showed himself to be a very good critic. It's true! It was a cultural revolution.

We were carrying out a kind of Copernican revolution. There was good reason to be surprised! And the Martiniquais were themselves surprised as they stood revealed to themselves. It was a strange encounter!

It modified quite a number of values.

* Which ones?

A.C.: We are by definition complicated beings. That is the general rule for any society but one that is particularly applicable in the case of societies where complex layers of sediment have been laid down as a result of the inequalities of colonial life. Not everything was negative, far from it. The hybridization of which we are the outcome has achievements and positive values to its credit wherein the West and Europe also had their share. There was, as I say, a positive side, the effects of which were only belatedly felt by the non-Europeans but which are undeniable and in which we are simultaneously agents and partners - and, I should add, sometimes the beneficiaries as well. The Abbe Gregoire(1), Victor Schoelcher(2) and all those who spoke out and still speak out, who campaigned for human rights without distinction of race and against discrimination, these were my guides in life. They stand forever as representatives of the West's great outpouring of magnanimity and solidarity, an essential contribution to the advancement of the ideas of practical universality and human values, ideas without which the world of today would not be able to see its way forward. I am forever a brother to them, at one with them in their combat and in their hopes.

* You made an important speech in Geneva in 1978, at the event called "Geneva and the Black World", in which you said: "The effective power of poetry, with its two faces, one looking nostalgically backward, the other looking prophetically forward, with the redeeming feature of its ability to redeem the self, is the power of intensifying life". Was your Cahier d'un retour au pays natal, published in 1939, just such a primary utterance?

A.C.: Yes, that is how I see it: a new starting-point, a real start - there are many false starts in life.

But I think that was, for me, the real start.

Disinterring memories, all that was buried, bringing it back, presenting it so that it bursts forth fully formed upon the world - I think this sends an important signal. To express, not suppress, the force of one's reaction, to wield reinvigorated words as a miraculous weapon against the silenced world, freeing it from gags that are often imposed from within.

* How does one set about "ungagging" the world?

A.C.: I simply believe in the redeeming power of words.

* Is that enough to dent with the human condition and the way it repeatedly slides out of control?

A.C.: Probably not, not without love and humanism.

I really do believe in human beings. I find. something of myself in all cultures, in that extraordinary effort that all people, everywhere, have made - and for what purpose?

Quite simply to make life livable!

It is no easy matter to put up with life and face up to death.

And this is what is so moving.

We are all taking part in the same great adventure.

That is what is meant by cultures, cultures that come together at some meeting-point.

* You invented the term "negritude", which has been the mortar holding together a historic movement. Does not the assertion of negritude carry with it the risk of separating you from others, from "non-blacks"?

A.C.: We have never regarded our specificity as the opposite or antithesis of universality. It seemed to us - or at least to me - to be very important to go on searching for our identity but at the same time to reject narrow nationalism, to reject racism, even reverse racism.

Our concern has always been a humanist concern and we wanted it to have roots.

We wanted to have roots and at the same time to communicate.

I think it was in a passage in Hegel emphasizing the master-slave dialectic that we found this idea about specificity. He points out that the particular and the universal are not to be seen as opposites, that the universal is not the negation of the particular but is reached by a deeper exploration of the particular.

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.

Not a cold reconciliation, but reconciliation in the heat of the fire, an alchemical reconciliation if you like.

The identity in question was an identity reconciled with the universal. For me there can never be any imprisonment within an identity.

Identity means having roots, but it is also a transition, a transition to the universal.

A great man has departed. Joins the ranks of our proud ancestors, an indomitable spirit. Could just be me, but "Voice of French Black Pride" in the title suggests much more than French speaking Africans reaffirming their worth as human beings, doesn't it?

The article starts off with the statement "Founding father of negritude"? I believe negritude is a world-view, and can as such have no founding fatherm It is something that develops with the race/group, changing with time and circumstance.

I never saw the use of the word Negritude....we are the OLDEST people on earth for frigin sake, how can we suddenly "form" a so called "black" identity?

Their negritude movememnt ended up doing more harm than good at the end and thats evident in the level of self knowledge and self esteem that most French speaking Africans have of themselves.

Yeah i know, i will get stonned, but i don't care. I lived through the remnant of their beliefs, and i din't like it.....too poluted for my liking and it offered no originality....too reliant on Western forms of idealogies(eg communism etc)

Anyway, may he have a peaceful journey.

Thanks for posting the interview EQ, didn't know much about him until now.

Since the advent of White (inc Arab) Supremacy, 1500 a.d approx, both of which have attempted to distort our past, denigrate us in order to establish said Supremacy complex amongst themselves and in turn impose their inferiority complex on us.