Aimé Césaire · Lablypedia

He founded the Parti progressiste martiniquais in 1958. He served in the French National Assembly from 1945 to 1993 and as President of the Regional Council of Martinique from 1983 to 1988. He was the Mayor of Fort-de-France for 56 years, from 1945 to 2001.

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

Student, educator and poet

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 was not happy there, and found the town's racial and class bigotry to be upsetting.

They lived near Mount Pelée, and Césaire often described himself as possessing similar characteristics to the volcano—impulsive, unpredictable, and explosive.

He believed that he was of Igbo descent, and thought of his first name Aimé as 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. There, he became acquainted with Léopold Sédar Senghor. Along with Léon Damas, whom Césaire had met in secondary school, they bonded over a shared intellectual interest in French poetry.

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.

In 1934, Césaire was invited by his friend Petar Guberina to the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, where in Šibenik he started writing his poem Notebook of a Return to the Native Land – one of the first expressions of the concept of Négritude.

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 poetic exploration of Caribbean life and cultural complexities in the New World. The work was part of the Négritude movement.

Césaire married fellow Martinican student Suzanne Roussi in 1937. 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 Frantz Fanon was a student. He became a significant influence on Fanon's intellectual development and ideas, being the first person to read Fanon's manuscripts. Césaire also served as an inspiration for, but did not teach, writer Édouard Glissant.

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World War II

The years of World War II were a period of increased literary and intellectual engagement for the Césaires. In 1941, 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 this sense, according to Ursula K. Heise, the publications of the French botanist Henri Stehlé in Tropiques in the early 1940s, 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...".

During an 1978 interview, 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. Despite instances of censorship, Césaire continued to advocate for Martinican cultural identity. He also became close to French surrealist poet André Breton, who spent time in Martinique during the war. The two had met in 1940, and Breton later championed Césaire's work.

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."

Political career

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.

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. 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).

In 1958, Césaire founded the Parti Progressiste Martiniquais. Césaire and the Parti Progressiste Martiniquais remained influential in Martinique's politics during the latter half of the 20th century. 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. In 1950, he wrote Discours sur le colonialisme (Discourse on Colonialism), a critique of European colonial practices and attitudes. In 1955, it was republished in the French review Présence Africaine, with an English translation 1957. In 1960, he published Toussaint Louverture, based on the life of the Haitian revolutionary. In 1969, he published the first version of Une Tempête, an adaptation of Shakespeare's The Tempest with themes resonating with a black audience.

Césaire served as President of the Regional Council of Martinique from 1983 to 1988. He retired as mayor of Fort-de-France in 2001, thus ending his political career.

Later life

In 2006, Césaire refused to meet the leader of the Union for a Popular Movement (UMP), Nicolas Sarkozy, a potential contender at the time for the 2007 presidential election, because the UMP had voted for the 2005 French law on colonialism. This law required teachers and textbooks to "acknowledge and recognize in particular the positive role of the French presence abroad, especially in North Africa", a law criticized by opponents for its positive portrayal of French colonialism, especially during the Algerian War. President Jacques Chirac finally had the controversial law repealed.

On 9 April 2008, Césaire had serious heart troubles and was admitted to Pierre Zobda Quitman hospital in Fort-de-France. He died on 17 April 2008, aged 94.

Césaire was accorded the honor of a state funeral, held at the Stade de Dillon in Fort-de-France on 20 April. French President Nicolas Sarkozy was present but did not make a speech. The honor of making the funeral oration was left to his longtime friend Pierre Aliker, who had served for many years as deputy mayor under Césaire.

Legacy

Martinique's airport at Le Lamentin was renamed Martinique Aimé Césaire International Airport on 15 January 2007. A national commemoration ceremony was held on 6 April 2011, as a plaque in Césaire's name was inaugurated in the Panthéon in Paris. He was also proclaimed as a national hero in Martinique.

Césaire's influence has been recognized in poetry from his era and in later works. Most notably, his relation to Frantz Fanon, famed author of Black Skin, White Masks, as mentor and inspiration is tangible. Fanon's personal testimony in Black Skin, White Masks explains the "liberating effect of Césaire's word and action" that he felt in traversing the changing colonial landscape. At one point, Fanon writes: "Once again I come back to Césaire; I wish that many black intellectuals would turn to him for their inspiration."

More generally, Césaire's works conceptualised African unity and black culture in ways that allowed for the creation of black spaces where there previously were none, from the establishment of several literary journals to his reworking of Caliban's speech from Shakespeare's The Tempest. Césaire's works have been described as significant contributions to postcolonial literature in France, its former colonies, and the Caribbean. In 2021, the Musée de l'Homme for its Portraits de France exhibition paid tribute to Aimé Césaire through a work by the artist Hom Nguyen.