The impact of Aimé Césaire

When Aimé Césaire died in Martinique April 17 at the age of 94, he received a concert of praise and homage from the world over.

Césaire was a national political figure in France, who received every politician who aspired to higher office in his home, everyone that is, except for the current president Nicolas Sarkozy, whose party had taken a racist position on France’s colonial legacy.

Césaire was elected mayor of Fort-de-France in Martinique and deputy in the National Assembly in 1945 with the support of the French Communist Party. He remained deputy until 1993 and mayor until 2001, although he resigned from the FCP in 1956.

He taught Frantz Fanon, anti-colonial author of “The Wretched of the Earth” and “Black Skin, White Masks,” and influenced other prominent Martiniquais.

But Césaire’s political career and teaching were just a small part of what he did.

As a student in Paris in the 1930s he met Leopold Sedar Senghor and Leon-Gontran Damas. Later Césaire said, “It was through Senghor that I met a whole continent. A land of which I had had no idea, other than an image very vague, confused. ... In bringing me to Africa, he brought me to the key of all that concerned me in my homeland. ... To understand Martinique, to understand the West Indies ... it was necessary to begin with Africa.” Senghor was to become the president of Senegal.

When he met the African-American poets Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen, who had fled to Paris to escape the noxious effects of U.S. racism, he got a shock that led him, along with Senghor and Damas, to critically examine the process of “assimilation.”

Beginning with an article in a 1934 issue of “The Black Student” (L’Etudiant noir), these three developed the concept of “negritude.” Confronting an arrogant, insolent, conquering Europe, they wrote: “Negritude is the re-appropriation of ourselves by ourselves. ... Our negritude is humanist, is situated in history. Our negritude is developing our roots.”

It was his conception of “negritude,” of the connection of Africans in the Diaspora with their continent of origin, expressed in his plays like “The tragedy of King Christophe” and “The Tempest,” his biography of Toussaint Louverture, his beautiful and politically strong poems, where the real influence of Aimé Césaire can be found.