Aimé Césaire's website

A collection of photos of Aimé Césaire

Poet, dramatist, statesman, former deputy for Martinique in the French National Assembly and mayor of its capital, Fort-de-France, Aimé Césaire was one of the earliest advocates of négritude — the awareness of the cultural and historical consequences of being African, or of African descent, in a then white-dominated world.

“Before Césaire, West Indian literature was a literature of Europeans,” wrote his fellow black Martinican, Frantz Fanon.

Césaire was the most famous son of his tiny island in the eastern Caribbean. His Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (Notebook of a Return to a Native Land) of which there are numerous translations into a number of languages, was certainly the most influential work ever written so far as francophone Africans and West Indians were concerned.

In 1934, with Léopold Senghor, later President of Senegal, and Léon Damas from French Guiana, he was a principal founder of the concept of négritude, which aimed to give again to black people a pride in their African roots. It was Césaire who coined the term in that year, in a student review, L’Etudiant noir, which he co-founded while at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. He felt that those of African descent had been denied their history, and that their cultural heritage had been assimilated by force into white cultures. Its unique genius, he asserted, should be recognised and nourished. This was black identity.

Aimé Fernand David Césaire was born in 1913 at Basse Pointe, in the shadow of the volcanic Mount Pelée on the northeast coast of the island of Martinique. His father was a taxation clerk, his mother a seamstress.

Martinique was the most assimilated of all French colonies. It was to become an overseas département (DOM) of France, and, indeed, Césaire was the rapporteur (member acting as a spokesman) in the Constituent Assembly which legislated for this new status in March 1946. (He had been elected to the Assembly in 1945, and then to the successor National Assembly in 1946, serving an unbroken tenure until 1993.)

This political assimilation was, Césaire saw — and Martinique still agrees with him — immensely advantageous economically to the inhabitants of the island. Cultural assimilation was an entirely different matter. He therefore rode two horses.

His parents were poor but literate. Indeed, Césaire exaggerated their poverty for effect in his greatest poem. He excelled at school on the island and on a scholarship continued his education in Paris, first at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, then the École Normale Supérieure (for teacher training) and finally the Sorbonne, where he studied the classics and French literature.

While in Paris, he wrote Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, but at that time it received little attention. It was written as an essay in self-discovery, to uncover his own essential négritude. He then returned to Martinique with his wife Suzanne Roussy (also from Martinique), both to begin teaching there at the Lycée Schoelcher in 1939.

The war brought a new political awareness to Martinique. The fall of France saw large warships and their crews which had been sent to its harbour for safety in effect interned there. Racial tensions grew between these crews, their families and the locals. The latter came together, overthrew the Vichy administration in the summer of 1943, and rallied to General de Gaulle. Césaire was prominent in this, and was elected mayor of Fort-de-France in 1945. (He remained mayor until 2001, the longest-serving ever.)