Aimé Césaire

P R E FA C E

Aimé Césaire introduced me to the literature of the French Caribbean. At the time, I was a graduate student at Boston University studying French literature in the

true sense of the word, literature written by writers born in France. During my undergraduate years, I had studied many of the great names, the best of whom for me resided in the nine- teenth century: Baudelaire, Flaubert and Rimbaud topped my list. My literary world at university, apart from these writers, also included writers from England and the English-speaking Caribbean. Although as a Trinidadian I had read Caribbean works at high school and on my own, my personal anthology was yet to include the great works of the French Caribbean and Haiti. I had heard of Césaire, but was formally introduced to him in a class on African literature that also included the Senegalese Léopold Sédar Senghor and Léon-Gontran Damas from French Guiana. All of these black writers were grouped under one umbrella as founding members of the Negritude movement. I quickly recognized and understood the sentiments in the poetry of both Senghor and Damas, but neither had the

impact of Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal. The work resounded on many levels. I was a Caribbean student studying in a foreign country, missing my homeland and knowing that the ideas of what it meant to be black had never been clearer. Still, more than the invaluable ideas of Negritude, it was also Césaire’s poetry that affected me and effected a personal prise de conscience. I reimagined the ways in which I saw the Caribbean in language and landscape.

During my qualifying examinations at the postgraduate level, I had another pivotal encounter with Césaire. For my qualifying exams, I was supposed to study a long list of writers from different centuries; I noticed that Césaire was not included on that list of great French writers from the twentieth century. I had no doubt in my mind that he deserved a place on that list, but in order for this to be done, I was asked to make a case before an examination committee. It must be said that this was still the mid-1980s and the metropolitan focus of my university was not uncommon among academic institutions at that time. Put it down to the bravery of youth, or the folly, but I remember the passion I felt in front of the committee, making my argument and believing that this was the most important thing that could possibly happen on that day. Césaire had to be placed on that list. What I remember was not my argument but my conviction. I was met with little resistance, just a few questions from a one or two professors and a small victory earned – Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (Notebook of a Return to My Native Land) was included on my qualifying reading list. Jump ahead several decades later to my professorial inaugural lecture at the University of the West Indies, entitled “Cracks in the Edifice: Notes of

a Native Daughter”. Once again I drew from Césaire, and one of his students, Frantz Fanon, to help shape my argument. Both men from the French Caribbean island of Martinique had had a global impact on theories of race, identity, culture and politics. Both men had pointed to the cracks that existed in their time and, as I argued in that lecture, still exist today.

My small victory at university was a drop in an ocean of praise that has been bestowed on Césaire. His influence has been profound and pervasive; his ideas have been validated and contested. As a poet, playwright, essayist, theorist and politician he has left us with some of the most precious treasures: ideas and poetry. The conviction since my student days remains: Césaire’s legacy is a part of our Caribbean heritage and is a necessary point of departure as we continue to grapple with who we are as a people in our young nations.