Aimé Césaire

Aimé Fernand David Césaire (26 June 1913 – 17 April 2008) was a Francophone Martinican poet, author, and politician.

He was "one of the founders of the Négritude movement in Francophone literature" and coined the word in French.

Aimé Césaire was born in Basse-Pointe, Martinique, French Caribbean, in 1913.

His father was a tax inspector, and his mother was a dressmaker.

'Although in his Cahier he evoked his childhood as poverty-stricken and squalid, his family was part of the island's small, black middle class.' 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.

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.

Césaire traveled to Paris to attend the Lycée Louis-le-Grand on an educational scholarship.

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.

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.

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.

Manifestos by these three students in its third number (May–June 1935) initiated the Négritude movement later substantial in both pan-Africanist theory and the actual decolonization of the French Empire in Africa.

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.

His works include the book-length poem Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (1939), Une Tempête, a response to Shakespeare's play The Tempest, and Discours sur le colonialisme (Discourse on Colonialism), an essay describing the strife between the colonizers and the colonized.

His works have been translated into many languages.

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.

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 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, and "the invocations of Césaire to the Antillean ecology operate as indices of a racial and cultural authenticity which is distinguished from European identity...".

The two had met in 1940, and Breton later would champion Cesaire's work.

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 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.

While departmentalization was implemented in 1946, the status did not bring many meaningful changes to the people of Martinique.

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, was published.

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."

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."

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).

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).

He founded the Parti progressiste martiniquais in 1958, and served in the French National Assembly from 1945 to 1993 and as President of the Regional Council of Martinique from 1983 to 1988.

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.

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.

Césaire's many run-ins with censorship did not deter him, however, from being an outspoken defendant of Martinican identity.

He also became close to French surrealist poet André Breton, who spent time in Martinique during the war.

Césaire declined to renew his mandate as deputy in the National Assembly in 1993, after a 47-year continuous term.

His writings during this period reflect his passion for civic and social engagement.