DISCUSS THE CONTRIBUTIONS OF AIME

CESAIRE TO THE EMERGENCE OF

THE EMERGENCE OF AN INDIGENOUS
VOICE
IN CARIBBEAN
INTELLECTUAL TRADITIONS.
Prepared by: Leroy Adolphus
Course: Caribbean Civilization
Presented on: July 4th 2011

What is the Caribbean

Intellectual Tradition?
Academic material or literature that
was originated in the Caribbean.
By their discussion around things
Caribbean
By their thematic concerns and
techniques used to challenge
imperial discourse.

Aim Csaire was born in

Basse-Pointe, Martinique in
1913.

KEY QUESTIONS & TOPICS

Who was Aim Csaire ?
What was his life as a
Student and a Poet?
How impactful was his

Who was Aim

Csaire
to attend the Lyce Louis-le-Grand
He traveled to Paris ?

on an educational scholarship. In Paris, Csaire

created, with Lopold Sdar Senghor and Lon Damas,
the literary review L'tudiant Noir (The Black Student).

In 1936, Csaire began work on his book-length poem

Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (Notebook of a Return

to My Native Land, 1939), a vivid and powerful
depiction of the ambiguities of Caribbean life and
culture in the New World and this upon returning home
to Martinique.

Political Career
Aime was also a
member of the
French Communist
Party in Martinique
In 1956 he resigned
from the French
Communist Party ,
following the
Hungarian
Revolution, which
saw Russias

The Dichotomy-

an up hill

task
The earliest representations of the
Caribbean have been through
writings by European writers in
texts such as Oroonoko and
Robinson Crusoe. These texts
reinforced colonial ideologies and
historical constructs of the
Caribbean people and its African
identity as inferior and
backward.

Aim
contribution

Csaires

Aime Cesaire, another French intellectual like

Glissant, was very instrumental in the negritude

movement. Through his writings he captured the
colonial experience and the major concern of that
time, exile, but pushed for the black man to have a
greater love and appreciation of self and culture.
Besides the thematic concerns, Cesaire challenges
imperial discourse, through style and structure. His
poems are general unrhyming; he hardly utilizes
traditional structures and so the poems can be
challenging. His style borders on a surreal with a mix
of modern so that Cesaire escapes the confines of
conventional British structure.

Negritude Movement
cont
Ngritude is a literary and

ideological movement, developed by

francophone black intellectuals,
writers, and politicians in France in
the 1930s by a group that included
the future Senegalese President
Lopold Sdar Senghor, Aim
Csaire, and the Guianan Lon
Damas.

Negritude Movement
cont
The Ngritude writers found solidarity in a

common black identity as a rejection of

French colonial racism. They believed that
the shared black heritage of members of the
African Diaspora was the best tool in fighting
against French political and intellectual
hegemony and domination. They formed a
realistic literary style and formulated their
Marxist ideas as part of this movement.

Negritude Movement.
There were some political limitations.

with French Colonial authorities and the

French colonialism was not on the political
front, rather it was more cultural
assimilation- this followed the policy of
French assimilation.
Ceasire was a proponent of department
status for French overseas territories. In
these departments economic benefits did
not take place, there was no difference in
the old and pre independence nation.

Negritude Movement.
It was against this backdrop the Negritude

Movement was birthed. Which is said to be the

French version of Garveynism. The Negritude
Movement concentrated on the emotional
output on life. Some of the themes that were
associated with this movement include:

Obsession and identify of the Blackman with the

emphasis on slavery
Hatred and rejection of the white world
Confidence with a universal black Fraternity

DISCOURSE
COLONIALISM

ON

His writings during this period reflect

his passion for civic and social
engagement. He wrote Discourse on
Colonialism, which served as a
denunciation of European colonial
racism, decadence, and hypocrisy
that was republished in the French
review in 1955.

DISCOURSE ON COLONIALISM
A civilization that proves incapable of solving the

problems it creates is a decadent civilization. A

civilization that chooses to close its eyes to its most
crucial problems is a stricken civilization. A
civilization that uses its principles for trickery and
deceit is a dying civilization. The fact is that the socalled European civilization "Western" civilization as it has been shaped by two centuries of bourgeois
rule, is incapable of solving the two major problems
to which its existence has given rise:

Cesaire, Aime. Discourse on Civilization, New York and

London: Monthly Review Press, 1972.

LIFES WORK

The Martinique-born Csaire wrote a

number of plays and poems in his

native French, but his best-known
work translated for English-speaking
audiences may be the epic poem
Return to My Native Land.

LIFES WORK
"The West told us that in order to be universal we

had to start by denying that we were black,"

Csaire explained about the concept in an
interview with in a UNESCO Courier writer Annick
Thebia Melsan.
"I, on the contrary, said to myself that the more we
were black, the more universal we would be. It was
a totally different approach. It was not a choice
between alternatives, but an effort at
reconciliation."

LIFES WORK

Csaire's plays have touched upon other

political themes from the history of a postcolonial world. A 1968 work, A Season in
the Congo, centers around the
independence movement and subsequent
civil strife involving assassinated
Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba. His
1985 play, A Tempest, was adapted from
the Shakespeare work and features a cast
of leading characters who represent the
various classes of a post-colonial, Africanheritage political atmosphere.

LIFES WORK
For me this is the critical

development and
Cesiares contribution to
the Caribbeans
intellectual traditions. He
joined the ranks of George
Belle, Paget Henry and
Rex Nettleford in making a
case against colonialism.

LIFES
WORK
writes

AP

In Paris in the 1930s he helped found the journal

Black Student, which gave birth to the idea of
negritude, a call to blacks to cultivate pride in
their heritage. His 1950 book Discourse on
Colonialism was considered a classic of French
political literature.
He returned to Martinique during World War II
and was mayor of Fort-de-France from 1945 to
2001, except for a break from 1983 to 1984.
Mr. Csaire helped Martinique shed its colonial
status in 1946 to become an overseas
department of France

LIFES
WORK
writes

AP

As the years passed, he remained firm in his views. In

2005 he refused to meet with Mr. Sarkozy, who was then

minister of the interior, because of Mr. Sarkozys
endorsement of a bill citing the positive role of
colonialism.

I remain faithful to my beliefs and remain inflexibly

anticolonialist, Mr. Csaire said at the time. The

offending language was struck from the bill.
Despite the snub, Mr. Sarkozy last year successfully led a
campaign to rename Martiniques airport in honor of Mr.
Csaire. Mr. Csaire eventually met with Mr. Sarkozy in
March 2006 but endorsed his Socialist rival, Sgolne
Royal, in the 2007 French elections.

THE CLOSING CHAPTER

Csaire retired from politics in 1993 at the age of

80. Four years later, interviewed by the UNESCO

Courier's Melsan, he said he remained committed
to the ideals he once detailed in his writings as a
college student in Paris. "I desire--passionately-that peoples should exist as peoples, that they
should prosper and make their contribution to
universal civilization, because the world of
colonization and its modern manifestations is a
world that crushes, a world of awful silence."

THE CLOSING CHAPTER

COLONIALISM

HE DIED IN 2008 AT A HOSPITAL WHERE HE WAS BEING

TREATED FOR HEART PROBLEMS AND OTHER AILMENTS

References:
Csaire, Aim. Letter to Maurice Thorez. Paris: Prsence africaine.

(1957).
Csaire, Aim. Notebook of a Return to the Native Land . Trans. and ed.
Clayton Eshleman and Annete Smith, with an introduction by Andr
Breton. Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2001.
Christian Filostrat, La Ngritude et la "Conscience raciale et
rvolutionaire sociale" d'Aim Csaire. Prsence Francophone No 21,
Automne 1980.
Henry, and the Epistemological Challenge in the Writing of Caribbean
Political Thought 2010
Henry, Paget Calibans Reason: Introducing Afro-Caribbean Philosophy .
New York: Rutledge (2002)
Joseph, Tennyson. An Extended Debate with Europe?: G.K. Lewis,
Dennis Benn, Paget
Joubert, Jean-Louis. "Csaire, Aim." In Dictionnaire encyclopdique de
la littrature franaise. Paris: Robert Laffont, 1999.
Malela, Buata. Le rebelle ou la qute de la libert chez Aim Csaire .
Revue Frontenac Review, 16-17, Queens University, Kingston (Ontario),
2003,