Aimé-Fernand-David Césaire Martinican poet, playwright, and politician, who was cofounder

with Léopold Sédar Senghor of Negritude, an influential movement to restore the cultural
identity of black Africans.

Together with Senghor and others involved in the Negritude movement, Césaire was educated in
Paris. In the early 1940s he returned to Martinique and engaged in political action supporting the
decolonization of the French colonies of Africa. In 1945 he became mayor of Fort-de-France, the
capital of Martinique, and he retained that position until 2001 (he was briefly out of office in
1983–84). In 1946 Césaire became a deputy for Martinique in the French National Assembly.
Viewing the plight of the blacks as only one facet of the proletarian struggle, he joined the
Communist Party (1946–56). He found that Surrealism, which freed him from the traditional
forms of language, was the best expression for his convictions. He voiced his ardent rebellion in
a French that was heavy with African imagery. In the fiery poems of Cahier d'un retour au pays
natal (1939; Return to My Native Land) and Soleil cou-coupé (1948; “Cutthroat Sun”), he lashed
out against the oppressors.

Césaire turned to the theatre, discarding Negritude for black militancy. His tragedies are
vehemently political: La Tragédie du Roi Christophe (1963; The Tragedy of King Christophe), a
drama of decolonization in 19th-century Haiti, and Une Saison au Congo (1966; A Season in the
Congo), the epic of the 1960 Congo rebellion and of the assassination of the Congolese political
leader Patrice Lumumba. Both depict the fate of black power as forever doomed to failure.

Négritude literary movement of the 1930s, '40s, and '50s that began among French-speaking
African and Caribbean writers living in Paris as a protest against French colonial rule and the
policy of assimilation. Its leading figure was Léopold Sédar Senghor (elected first president of
the Republic of Senegal in 1960), who, along with Aimé Césaire from Martinique and Léon
Damas from French Guiana, began to examine Western values critically and to reassess African
culture.

The Negritude movement was influenced by the Harlem Renaissance, a literary and artistic
flowering that emerged among a group of black thinkers and artists (including novelists and
poets) in the United States, in New York City, during the 1920s. The group was determined to
throw off the masking (to use the word of critic Houston A. Baker, Jr.) and indirection that had
necessarily attended black expression in a hostile society. The Harlem Renaissance is associated
with such writers as poet Langston Hughes, but it was Claude McKay, a somewhat lesser-known
figure, who caught the attention of Senghor. The Jamaican-born poet and novelist was one of the
Harlem group's most prominent spokesmen. He believed that a writer should deal with important
political subjects, and he himself had much to say about institutionalized racism.

McKay spent a good deal of time in France, where he got to know a West Indian family who
held an informal salon attended by writers, musicians, and intellectuals, including visiting
Americans. Members of the group that attended the salon began to publish Revue du Monde Noir
(“Review of the Black World”) in 1931. Poetry by McKay and Hughes appeared in the review,
where Senghor, an occasional visitor to the salon, probably saw their work. Possibly by that time,
he had already read McKay's Banjo, a picaresque novel that affected him deeply; translated into
French in 1929, it centres on black seamen in Marseilles and is notable in part for its portrayal of
French treatment of black colonials. In any case, Senghor called McKay “the true inventor of
[the values of] Negritude.” Césaire said of Banjo that in it blacks were described for the first time
“truthfully, without inhibition or prejudice.” The word “Negritude,” however, was coined by
Césaire himself, in his 1939 poem “Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (“Notebook of a Return to
My Native Land”).

The assertion of black pride by members of the Negritude movement was attended by a cry
against assimilation. They felt that although it was theoretically based on a belief in universal
equality, it still assumed the superiority of European culture and civilization over that of Africa
(or assumed that Africa had no history or culture). They were also disturbed by the world wars,
in which they saw their countrymen not only dying for a cause that was not theirs but being
treated as inferiors on the battlefield. They became increasingly aware, through their study of
history, of the suffering and humiliation of black people—first under the bondage of slavery and
then under colonial rule. These views inspired many of the basic ideas behind Negritude: that the
mystic warmth of African life, gaining strength from its closeness to nature and its constant
contact with ancestors, should be continually placed in proper perspective against the
soullessness and materialism of Western culture; that Africans must look to their own cultural
heritage to determine the values and traditions that are most useful in the modern world; that
committed writers should use African subject matter and poetic traditions and should excite a
desire for political freedom; that Negritude itself encompasses the whole of African cultural,
economic, social, and political values; and that, above all, the value and dignity of African
traditions and peoples must be asserted.

Senghor treated all of these themes in his poetry and inspired a number of other writers: Birago
Diop from Senegal, whose poems explore the mystique of African life; David Diop, writer of
revolutionary protest poetry; Jacques Rabemananjara, whose poems and plays glorify the history
and culture of Madagascar; Cameroonians Mongo Beti and Ferdinand Oyono, who wrote
anticolonialist novels; and the Congolese poet Tchicaya U Tam'si, whose extremely personal
poetry does not neglect the sufferings of the African peoples. The movement largely faded in the
early 1960s when its political and cultural objectives had been achieved in most African
countries.

[From Encyclopedia Britannica]