A Tempest

At the start of the Introduction, American historian Robin D. G. Kelley identifies the French poet and playwright Aimé Césaire as the founder of Négritude, which is “the first diasporic ‘black pride’ movement” (vii), and a Surrealist. Kelley admires Césaire’s ability to use poetry as a political weapon.

In his brief biography of Césaire, Kelley describes him as a gifted student who grew up in a large family in Martinique. Césaire grew up in near poverty, though his father had received a good education, and in 1931, Césaire moved to Paris to prepare for the entrance exams to a teacher training school. With Léopold Sédar Senghor, a Senegalese poet and intellectual, and the poet Léon-Gontran Damas, Césaire started a publication called L’Étudiant Noir, or The Black Student, in which he first referred to the term “Négritude.”

In 1941, after publishing what would become his most famous poem and marrying another student from Martinique named Suzanne Roussi, Césaire returned home. Together, they launched another journal, Tropiques, and their first issue coincided with the Vichy usurpation of France and its colonies. While under intense political scrutiny, the founders of the journal disguised the anticolonial perspectives in Tropiques as articles about “West Indian folklore” (ix). As evidenced by the essays and poems in Tropiques, Surrealism became “an extension of [Césaire’s] search for a new black subjectivity” (x), a subjectivity he strove for while developing his notions of Négritude. He and his like-minded intellectuals felt they were French only superficially; their most essential selves were not French but black.

At the end of World War II, Césaire became a Communist as well as the mayor of Fort-de-France in Martinique and deputy to the French National Assembly. As a result of his efforts, the status of Martinique and other island nations under French rule changed from colonies to “departments.”

In 1950, Césaire published his first work of non-fiction, Discourse on Colonialism. In this book, he argues that colonialism “’decivilize[s]’ the colonizer” because the tools of colonizers are violent and dehumanizing (xi). Colonialism leads to chaos in a spiritual sense and a literal sense; problems of race and culture must exist alongside “the police and the use of forced labor” for colonial ideology to flourish (xi). Césaire also makes a controversial connection between colonialism and fascism, suggesting that a new way of life that embraces both modern tradition and non-Western tradition must be possible. Eventually, Césaire came to believe that only revolution could bring about the independence this new way of life requires.

Césaire continued to write poetry and nonfiction before he began to write plays, and all his works contain critiques of colonial traditions like slavery and postcolonial politics. His adaptation of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest was first performed in 1969. According to Kelley, Césaire has influenced all the “major ideologies and movements of the modern world” (xv). Kelley asserts that though all these ideas sought a successful approach to progress, Césaire knew that these notions would fail to grant freedom and liberty to all.