Aimé Cesaire passes on
~ Region mourns loss of a great ambassador ~
MARIGOT/FORT-DE-FRANCE--President Louis-Constant Fleming has extended his condolences on behalf of the Territorial Council, St. Martin, and the Collectivité, to the family of French Caribbean poet Aimé Cesaire who died in his native Martinique on Thursday aged 94.
Cesaire, the founding father of the “negritude” movement that celebrated black consciousness, was admitted to the Mesnard Hospital in Fort-de-France last week suffering from heart and other problems.
“His death marks the loss of one of the most talented representatives of the French literary world,” said Fleming. He said the Antilles is left to mourn the passing of one of its greatest ambassadors.
Cesaire’s writings offered insight into how France imposed its culture on its citizens of different origins in the early part of the 20th century. The themes still resonate in French politics today as the country continues to struggle to integrate many of its residents of African and North African origin.
The Caribbean writer rose to fame with his “Notebook of a Return to the Native land” written in the 1930s in which he says, “My negritude in neither tower nor cathedral, it plunges into the red flesh of the soil.”
Cesaire and African intellectual Leopold Seghor – later president of Senegal – founded “The Black Student” in 1934, a journal that encouraged people to develop a black identity. He was also a friend of the French surrealist poet André Breton who had encouraged him to become a major voice of Surrealism.
Cesaire’s poems expressed the degradation of black people in the Caribbean and describe the rediscovery of an African sense of self. In his “Discourse on Colonialism” first published in 1950, he compared the relationship between the coloniser and the colonised with the Nazis and their victims.
He was also a mentor to fellow Martinician author Frantz Fanon and their anti-colonial writings were a major influence in the heady intellectual climate of the 1960s and 1970s in France.
His anti-colonial rhetoric did not prevent Cesaire from having a long lasting political career however. He was Mayor of Martinique’s major city Fort-de-France for more than half a century, first elected in 1945 aged 32, and later elected Deputy of Parliament, a post he held until the early 1990s.
A graduate of the prestigious French Ecole Normale Superieur, he remained a member of the French Communist party until the Soviet Hungarian repression of 1956.
Cesaire was born in 1913 in the small town of Basse-Pointe in Martinique. He married Suzanne Roussi in 1937, a gifted writer in her own right, with whom he had six children.
