(b. Martinique, 26 June 1913) Martinican; Mayor of Fort-de France 1945 – 2001, Député 1946 – 95 Born into a poor black family in French colonial Martinique, Césaire was educated in the island, winning a scholarship to study in Paris. Active in left-wing and artistic circles in Paris, he returned to Martinique in 1939 as a militant anti-colonialist, poet, and exponent of négritude — the positive assertion of African cultural values. In the early stage of the Second World War Martinique supported Vichy France and was blockaded by the US navy. By 1942 Césaire had joined the Parti Communiste Français (PCF) and had attracted a following of intellectuals through his teaching and writing. In 1945 he stood as a PCF candidate for the mayorship of Fort-de-France and was overwhelmingly elected. The following year he was also elected as a Communist député to represent Martinique in the French National Assembly.

Césaire was an enthusiastic champion of "departmentalization", the process by which Martinique (together with Guadeloupe, Guyane, and Réunion) became full départements of the French Republic. This, he believed, would raise Martinicans' living standards to a level comparable with those of the metropole. At the same time, he argued for political and cultural autonomy for the island, rejecting the assimilationist impetus of the French state. He also came to reject the centralizing influence of the PCF and left in 1956, forming his own Parti Progressiste Martiniquais (PPM) in 1958.

For half a century Césaire represented Fort-de-France as mayor and Martinique as député in Paris. In 1981 he declared support for François Mitterand's Parti Socialiste (PS) and found in Mitterand's decentralization programme a structure within which he could continue to advocate departmentalization and autonomy. As Martinique became a région, with increased political and financial autonomy, Césaire could claim that the island was both part of the French Republic yet autonomous in many respects.

The author of some highly regarded poetry, theatre, and history, Césaire became an institution in Martinique, symbolizing the island's continuing dependence upon France but also its own distinctive culture. He was perhaps more influential in the newly independent French-speaking states of Africa than elsewhere in the Caribbean, where Martinique and Guadeloupe are rarely viewed as parts of the regional community.

writer; politician

Personal Information

Born on June 25, 1913, in Basse-Pointe, Martinique, West Indies; married Suzanne Roussy (a teacher), July 10, 1937 (died, 1966); children: Jacques, Jean-Paul, Francis, Ina, Marc, Michelle
Education: Attended the École Normale Supérieure, Paris, 1935-39; Sorbonne, University of Paris, licencié és lettres1936.
Politics: Parti Progressiste Martiniquais.
Memberships: Conseil régional Martinique, president, 1983-86; Society of African Culture, Paris.

Career

Playwright, poet, and essayist; L'Étudiant noir, Paris, founder, with Léopold Senghor and Léon Dames, 1934; Lycée Schoelcher, Fort-de-France, Martinique, teacher, 1939-45; Tropiques, Fort-de-France, editor, 1941-45; member of the two French constituent assemblies, 1945-46; Fort-de-France, mayor, 1945-83; French National Assembly, deputy representing Martinique, 1946-83; Parti Progressiste Martiniquais, founding member, later president.

Life's Work

The West Indian playwright and politician Aimé Césaire emerged as one of the leading voices in the négritude movement in the 1930s. Searching for a way to unite the peoples of the African diaspora, Césaire and future Senegalese President Léopold Sédar Senghor coined the term "negritude" while studying in Paris in the 1930s. It urged blacks to reject the idea of nationalism as well as that of any white influence upon one's culture, and instead embrace and celebrate one's African heritage. The American poet Langston Hughes was one of the first to adopt it.

The Martinique-born Césaire 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. Long active in Martinican politics, he served in the French National Assembly as a representative of his island nation for decades; he was also mayor of Fort-de-France, the capital city. In a 1995 Research in African Literatures essay, Lilyan Kesteloot called him an "extraordinary man who has profoundly marked two generations of African intellectuals and who continues to stir the students who study him in our schools and universities."

Born on June 25, 1913, in Basse-Pointe, Césaire grew up in a Martinique that had been a colony of France since 1635. It grew sugar and tobacco, and had been the subject of a long battle between the British and the French for hegemony. Once populated by Carib Indians, Martinique was a slave state until 1848, and the descendants of those slaves emerged as a strong political voice on the island nation in the twentieth century. Césaire's political awareness was shaped by his time in Paris, where he arrived in 1931 for further schooling. He fell in with many other black students from other French colonies, especially those from Africa, like Senghor, and was active in the Society for African Culture. Along with Senghor and Léon Damas, he helped found L'Étudiant noir, or "The Black Student," a magazine of black culture and politics in 1934.

Césaire studied at the Sorbonne and wrote poetry during his years in Paris. His major work, Return to My Native Land, was penned as he planned his return to Martinique. The 1,000-line poem first appeared in an issue of Volontes in 1939, in the original French, but it caused a sensation. "Bristling with learned words, neologisms, and a hypercomplex syntax, it made a direct hit on the African continent as well as on the intellectuals in the Antilles, and even those of anglophone or lusophone [Portuguese-speaking] Africa," noted Kesteloot.

Return to My Native Land contained the first-ever use of the term "négritude," and the idea incited an entire generation of post-colonial writers and minds, in both the Caribbean world and on the African continent. "The West told us that in order to be universal we had to start by denying that we were black," Césaire 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."

When he returned to Martinique, Césaire taught at a lycée (school) in Fort-de-France for several years, and also served as editor of Tropiques, a magazine that was censored by the French authorities on orders of the collaborationist Vichy government at a time when France, still Martinique's master, was occupied by Nazi Germany. After the end of World War II, Césaire emerged as a leading political figure and was elected mayor of Fort-de-France in 1945. The following year, he won a seat representing Martinique in the French National Assembly, and was regularly returned to it by voters.

Initially a member of Martinique's Communist party, Césaire abandoned the party in 1957 to co-found and later head the Parti Progressiste Martiniquais (PPM). The PPM was left-leaning, but did not call for full independence. Instead it advocated maintaining ties to France but with self-rule, a plan that Césaire helped author in the late 1940s. When this plan was adopted, Martinique shed its colonial status and instead became an overseas département of France, equal in the political sphere to storied French areas like Provence-Alpes-Côte-d'Azur and Bretagne, or Brittany. The island is one of four overseas départements, and has a relationship to France similar to that of Puerto Rico to the United States. It is heavily subsidized by France, too, giving it a much higher standard of living than members of some other Caribbean island nations. "The anomaly of modern-day Martinique is hence largely Césaire's creation," declared Guardian writer James Ferguson. "A part of France--and by extension the European Union--with identical laws, directives and welfare provisions, it is a subsidised first-world enclave in the Caribbean, eyed enviously yet condescendingly by its poorer but independent neighbours."

Césaire served as mayor of Fort-de-France until 1983, and in addition to his legislative duties in Paris he also continued to write. He turned to playwriting in the late 1950s, and the first of his works for the stage to be translated and performed in English was The Tragedy of King Christophe. The work is set in Haiti and follows the true story of King Henri Christophe, a hotel employee who led a rebellion in 1806 and became king of a large portion of Haiti. He ruled as a petty tyrant, and was himself ousted by a rebellion and committed suicide. Césaire's cautionary tale, noted an essay on his career as a playwright in the International Dictionary of Theatre, serves as "an account of political failure. Christophe's inability to free his people from the alienation induced by centuries of colonialism sounds a warning to the leaders of newly independent Africa."

Césaire's plays have touched upon other political themes from the history of a post-colonial 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, African-heritage political atmosphere.

Césaire retired from politics in 1993 at the age of 80. Four years later, interviewed by the UNESCO Courier's Melsan, 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."

Awards

Laporte Prize, 1960; Viareggio-Versilia Prize for Literature, 1968; Grand Prix National de Poésie, 1982; Commander of the Order of Merit of Cote d'Ivoire, 2002.

Works

Selected writings

• Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (poems), 1947; revised edition 1956; published as Return to My Native Land, translated by John Berger and Anna Bostock, Penguin, 1969.
• Corps perdu (poems), with illustrations by Pablo Picasso, 1950; published as Lost Body, translated by Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith, Braziller, 1986.
• Cadastre (poems), 1961; published as Cadastre, translated by Emile Snyder and Sanford Upson, Third Press, 1973.
• La Tragédie du roi Christophe (play; produced in Salzburg, Austria, 1964), 1963; revised edition, 1970; published as The Tragedy of King Christophe, translated by Ralph Manheim, Grove Press, 1970.
• Une Saison au Congo (play; produced by the Théâtre Vivant, Brussels, Belgium, 1966), 1966; published as A Season in the Congo, translated by Manheim, Grove Press, 1968.
• State of the Union (poems), translated by Eshleman and Denis Kelly, distributed by Asphodel Book Shop, 1966.
• Une Tempete: Adaptation pour un théâtre nègre, from The Tempest by Shakespeare (play; produced in Hammamet, Tunisia, 1969), 1969; published as A Tempest, translated by Richard Miller, G. Borchardt, 1985.
• Culture and Colonization (nonfiction), University of Yaounde, 1978.
• Lyric and Dramatic Poetry 1946-82, translated by Eshleman and Smith, University Press of Virginia, 1990.
• Aimé Césaire: The Collected Poetry, translated by Eshleman and Smith, University of California Press, 1983.
• Non-Vicious Circle: Twenty Poems, translated by Gregson Davis, Stanford University Press, 1984.

Further Reading

Books

• Arnold, A. James, Modernism and Négritude: The Poetry and Poetics of Aimé Césaire, Harvard University Press, 1981.
• Davis, Gregson, Aimé Césaire, Cambridge University Press, 1997.
• Frutkin, Susan, Aimé Césaire: Black between Worlds, University of Miami, 1973.
• International Dictionary of Theatre, Volume 2: Playwrights, St. James Press, 1993.
• Pallister, Janis L., Aimé Césaire, Twayne, 1991.
• Scharfman, Ronnie Leah, Engagement and the Language of the Subject in the Poetry of Aimé Césaire, University of Florida Press, 1987.
• Suk, Jeannie, Postcolonial Paradoxes in French Caribbean Writing: Césaire, Glissant, Condé, Clarendon, 2001.

Periodicals

• Guardian (London, England), March 13, 1999, p. 10.
• Research in African Literatures, Summer 1995, p. 169, p. 174; Winter 2001, p. 77.
• UNESCO Courier, May 1997, p. 4.

On-line

• "Aimé Césaire," Biography Resource Center, www.galenet.com/servlet/BioRC (October 12, 2004).

— Carol Brennan

For more information on Aimé-Fernand-David Césaire, visit Britannica.com.

Césaire, Aimé (b. 1913). Martinican poet, dramatist, historian, politician, and, with Léon Damas and Léopold Sedar Senghor, the founder of the négritude movement of West Indian and African writers in French.

Césaire grew up in a black lower-middle class family (his father was a tax inspector, his mother a dressmaker) in which French rather than Creole was the normal language of communication. From the Lycée Schoelcher in Fort-de-France (where Damas was a fellow pupil), Césaire proceeded, in 1931, to the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris (where he met Senghor) and thence, in 1935, to the École Normale Supérieure. Elected president of the federation of Martinican students in Paris, Césaire collaborated with Senghor and a number of fellow French West Indian students on the sole number of the journal L' Étudiant noir (1935). In it he published an article, ‘Nègreries. Jeunesse noire et assimilation’, which contains in embryo all the themes that he was to elaborate in his later writings, most notably a rejection of the assimilationist assumptions of French colonialism and the need for colonized Africans and West Indians to assert their separate cultural, psychological, spiritual, and racial identities.

Césaire began to write his first and most influential work, Cahier d'un retour au pays natal, in 1935, while on holiday in Yugoslavia. He claims to have been inspired by the sight of the Adriatic island of Martinska to embark upon a passionate défense et illustration in poetry of Martinique and its people from the period of slavery up to the present. In 1936 he visited Martinique for the first time in five years and completed the poem in 1937. Alternating violently between phases of despair and resignation and phases of hope and revolt, the shift from one to the other being mirrored in the text's frequent shifts from prose to verse, the Cahier describes the journey of a colonized black West Indian from a condition of physical, cultural, and existential exile back to the ‘native land’ of his authentic self; in it the language and imagery of Surrealism are placed at the service of the emerging concept of négritude.

After rejection by French publishers in 1937-8, the first version of the Cahier was finally published by the review Volontés in August 1939, at the very moment when Césaire, with war about to erupt in Europe, returned along with his wife, the Martinican poet Suzanne Roussy, to his pays natal. He remained there till 1944, teaching at the Lycée Schoelcher and influencing a whole generation of young Martinicans, including Fanon and Glissant. In 1941 Césaire, his wife, and a number of other Martinican writers founded the review Tropiques which, in the face of continuous threats of censorship by the local version of the Vichy regime, developed the project of racial, cultural, and psychological self-assertion initiated by the Cahier. The Tropiques group's advocacy of Surrealism as a means of combating the multiple alienations of colonialism was encouraged by the brief visit of André Breton to Martinique in 1941. It was Breton's essay, ‘Un grand poéte noir’, which, serving as the preface to an enlarged and revised version of the Cahier published (with a translation into English) in New York in 1947, brought Césaire and his work to the attention of a wider public in France, its colonial empire, and elsewhere.

After an extended visit to Haiti in 1944, Césaire was approached by Martinican Communists to stand as the party's candidate as mayor of Fort-de-France and député for the central constituency of Martinique at elections for the Assemblée Nationale Constituante convened in Paris following the Liberation. Despite having had no previous contacts with the Communist Party in either its local or metropolitan version, Césaire accepted; in 1945 he was duly elected to both positions, which he held without interruption for over four decades until standing down as député in 1993. In 1946 he was parliamentary rapporteur for the law which transformed Martinique, along with Guadeloupe, Guyane, and Reunion, into a département of France. The same year saw the publication by Gallimard of poems that had appeared in Tropiques during the war, under the title of Les Armes miraculeuses; the volume also contained a striking drama entitled Et les chiens se taisaient on the subject of slavery, colonialism, and racism. A further volume of poems entitled Soleil cou coupé was published in 1948, followed by Corps perdu, illustrated with 32 engravings by Picasso, in 1950.

In 1947 Césaire was active, along with Senghor, Damas, Alioune Diop, and others, in founding the review Présence africaine, and in 1949 attended Communist-sponsored peace-conferences in Poland and Romania. In 1950 his Discours sur le colonialisme gained him a world-wide reputation as an enemy of colonialism and advocate of the distinctive destiny of colonized peoples. By 1953 he was increasingly troubled by the growing contradiction between his essentially race- and culture-based assertion of the distinctive identity of Black people in his literary and polemical works and the class-based universalist assumptions of the political party to which he belonged. After delivering a communication entitled ‘Culture et colonisation’ at the first Congrès International des Écrivains et Artistes Noirs held in Paris in September 1956, Césaire the following month announced his resignation from the Communist Party in his celebrated Lettre à Maurice Thorez. In 1958 he formed his own Parti Progressiste Martiniquais, with autonomy (i.e. local self-government within the context of a continued relationship with France) as its preferred solution to the political, economic, and cultural problems of Martinique; it should be noted that at no point has Césaire advocated out-and-out independence for his pays natal.

In 1960 a new book of poems, Ferrements, was published. Its title indicates the two poles—‘ferments’ and ‘ferrements’ (i.e. irons)—that had dominated Césaire's experience in the 1950s and would continue to do so in the years that followed. In 1960, too, Césaire published a major historical study of Toussaint Louverture, and in 1961 Soleil cou coupé (1948) and Corps perdu (1950) were republished in much-revised and abridged form under the joint title of Cadastre. Increasingly, though, it was the theatre rather than poetry that became the centre of Césaire's literary activities. In 1963 he published the first of a trilogy of ‘drames de la décolonisation’, La Tragédie du Roi Christophe, which, focusing on postindependence Haiti, was first staged at Salzburg in 1964 and, amid much controversy, at the Théâtre de l'Odéon in Paris in 1965. Recent events in Africa formed the theme of Une saison au Congo which, published in book form in 1966, was performed in Venice and Paris the following year. The trilogy was completed by an adventurous rewriting of Shakespeare's Tempest, Une tempête, which, following productions in Tunisia and Paris in 1969, was performed in Martinique in 1972 on the occasion of the first Festival Cultural de Fort-de-France, the first time that one of Césaire's plays had been seen by a Martinican audience.

After the early 1970s Césaire's career as a writer showed a definite falling-off, with only two collections of poems, Noria (included in the three-volume Œuvres complètes published in Fort-de-France in 1976) and Moi, laminaire… (1982). In the course of two decades he seemed increasingly dominated by day-to-day politics in Martinique and the French Assembly. Politically, he became more and more of an establishment figure, voting with the French Socialist Party in the Assembly and, in 1982, becoming the first president of the newly constituted Conseil Régional de la Martinique which, in the view of a younger generation of Martinican nationalists, is merely one further mechanism of French neo-colonialism in the island. His belief in the fundamental ‘African-ness’ of West Indian cultures has come under attack from the proponents of créolité [see Conflant]. There was always a tension between the radicalism of Césaire's poetic and dramatic works and the moderation and frequent uncertainty of his political praxis, but, on the strength, above all, of Cahier d'un retour au pays natal, his place as the ‘grand poète noir’ hailed by Breton remains secure.

[Richard Burton]

Bibliography

• R. L. Scharfman, ‘Engagement’ and the Language of the Subject in the Poetry of Aimé Césaire (1980)
• A. J. Arnold, Modernism and Negritude: The Poetry and Poetics of Aimé Césaire (1981)
• R. Toumson and S. Henry-Valmore, Aimé Césaire Le Négre inconsolé (1993)

(ĕmā' sāzĕr') , 1913–, West Indian poet and essayist who writes in French. After studying in Paris he became concerned with the plight of blacks in what he considers a decadent Western society. With Léopold Senghor and Léon Damas he formulated the concept of négritude, which urged blacks to reject assimilation and cultivate consciousness of their own racial qualities and heritage. Césaire voiced this idea through poetry, collected in such volumes as Les armes miraculeuses (1946) and Ferrements (1960) and in the essay Discours sur le colonialisme (1950, tr. 1972). In addition to his literary output, which comprises poetry, plays, and historical essays on black leaders, Césaire has held a number of government positions in his native Martinique, including that of mayor of Fort-de-France.

Bibliography

See study by S. Frutkin (1973).