I am a slow, deliberate writer, so sometimes it takes me a while to process a monumental event. The death of Aime Cesaire was one of these events.I also realized as the day went on that I was remiss in not providing a personal context for the life of the Cesaire, especially for the younger readers of this blog who are sometimes deceived by the illusion of time and linearity into believing that certain actions are inevitable—thereby dismissing personal agency and courage. And Cesaire was certainly courageous, and the impact of his work was felt beyond the Caribbean.
It is also one of the aims of this blog to provide the historical context between writers of Caribbean writers from the past and the present. For if this link is broken, then the writer finds himself or herself reinventing the wheel. (In some cases, this is not entirely bad—you need a dust up every now and then). But in terms of a nascent regional literature—a corpus of literary works that describes the lives, dreams, hopes tragedies of a people—such continuity is desirable.
This is especially true when a nation or region has been subject to outside forms of oppression such as British, French, Spanish, or Dutch colonialism, which was the thread that led me to Cesaire’s work and goes back to my undergraduate days at the University of Miami.
During that time, I was still trying to figure out the basis of my poetics (not that I have arrived at any final conclusions) and I began to study the work of Langston Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance and Leopold Senghor and Aime Cesaire and Negritude.
I was struck immediately by Hughes’s manifesto, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” and even more affected by the principles of Negritude that Senghor and Cesaire applied to poetry: “An image or group of images that were analogical, melodic, and rhythmical.” This definition helped me to sort out my own poetic tastes. For whereas the work of TS Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and Ezra Pound had rich imagery, they lacked melody and rhythm. And while the work of the dub poets of my generation were “melodic and rhythmical,” they lacked the kind of imagery that I’d seen in the work of Walcott, Scott, McNeill, and Brathwaite—whose work was directly influenced by Cesaire.
But another reason for my enormous respect for Cesaire was his fierce stance against French (and by extension) British, Spanish and Dutch colonialism. Now I realize it is unfashionable to speak about slavery and colonialism, and I certainly do not subscribe to any kind of victimology, but a great evil was perpetrated against people of African descent. Cesaire was one of the first to speak out against this evil.
And while it may be argued that the French, British, Spanish and French were all at one time subjugated peoples, African colonialism was not only different in scale and with the myriad of players involved, it came with a type of thorough brainwashing and denigration of a people that led to all kinds of loss of identity (read Fanon) and self hatred—some even loving the master’s whip to the caress of a brother or sister. Effects that we still witness the legacy in many of the inner cities of North America and the Caribbean. Colonialism threatened the soul of people of African decent. And if the soul exists, it is connected to the integrity of the individual. Cesaire gave us back our integrity.
Aime Cesaire and Negritude began one of the movements that Professor Rex Nettleford has called the “decolonization of the mind.” For poets such as Cesaire, freedom is not an abstract idea. His legacy is for us to pursue freedom (self-actualization) in the body and the mind—the abilty to realize the full expression of an individual talent unbound by race, class, creed, religion, gender or sexual preference.
For if the goal of any life is freedom, then Aime Cesaire was a light.
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Photo credit: Le Figaro
