Few French, always Martinican. Poet, playwright, activist, thinker, politician. Aime Fernand David Cesaire. A poet who has consented to long vigils on the side of humanity all his life. Always black anger.
He is conscious, his place is meaningful, and his pen is sharp. We know him from the barricades he built with his poetry and skin color. He is one of the leading cavalrymen of the relentless war against French colonialism, with the identity he clings to based on himself. Cesaire, who resisted cultural oppression and struggled to send the wave of racism back to where it came from, began speaking and writing from these places in 1936. Cesaire, who founded the Negritude cultural movement with an anti-colonial identity focused on Black Consciousness under the leadership of Senegalese poet Senghor, Guinean writer Amalcar Cabral, Senegalese writer Alioune Diop and Guyanese poet Léon Damas, helped the critique of colonialism (Eurocentric view) exist on an aesthetic and literary ground. He is still remembered for his role.
Aimé Fernand David Césaire (26 June 1913 – 17 April 2008) was a French poet, author, and politician. He was "one of the founders of the Négritude movement in Francophone literature" and coined the word négritude in French.
Aime Cesaire was from Martinique. His story, which began on this island in the French Caribbean, whose population consisted entirely of slaves forced from Africa, ended here again. When he was born on June 26, 1913, in Basse-Pointe, Martinique, everything about his struggle was just beginning. Officer father, tailor mother, son from Martinique, in France, far from Africa. Cesaire spends his brilliant student years in Martinique. After completing part of his high school education, when he goes to the capital city, Paris, which is 7 thousand kilometers away, the first question that always comes to mind is: Why is it 7 thousand kilometers away, Paris and Africa? He tries to understand the existence of "black" in the middle of the ocean.
Césaire establishes his first ties with black students in France through these questions. He meets the Senegalese poet Senghor, and comprehending the seriousness of colonialism, racism, and the colonial system, he decides to publish a newspaper called L'Étudiant noir in 1934. Returning to Martinique in 1939 and starting to teach, will be considered the turning point of events that will lead to the spread of his ideas, his name to be heard more, and the expansion of his sphere of influence on the island where the censorship/oppression environment is dominant. Already with the end of the Second World War, he would first become the mayor of the city of Fort de France, the capital of Martinique, and then take place as a Martinique deputy in the French National Assembly. He is now in the ranks of the French Communist Party, which he will resign in 1956. He will become a legend by continuing his duty as mayor for 50 years. There is no tension between Césaire's political career, struggle, and activism, and is the author of works such as The Discourse on Colonialism, which are among the main texts to be read in order to understand concepts such as colonialism-civilization-Eurocentrism-bourgeois humanism-enlightenment-racism, and his identity as a literary/poet. Together with these two identities, he is Aimé Césaire.
Benjamin Péret salutes Aimé Césaire: "I am honored to greet here a great poet, the only great poet to have appeared in the French language in the last two decades. For the first time, a tropical voice resonates in our language, an exotic that is nothing more than a tasteless ornament in a mediocre interior. It resonates not to spice the poem up, but to shine an authentic poem that springs from rotten orchid stems and electric butterflies scavenging carrion, the wild cry of a dominating sadistic nature that devours humans and machines like flowers do dragonflies. : It is the dazzling language of hummingbirds whose language draws lines against a mercury sky rather than its own.
In his poetry, we find the unrestrained movement of the great bread trees and the enchanted emphasis of the Voodoo drums. Poetry-laden black magic stands against the revolt of the slave-owning religions, where all magic is transformed and all poetry dies forever. I am honored to greet here the first great black poet to cut his ropes and set sail, disregarding any Pole Star, no intellectual Southern Cross, using his blind desire as the sole guide.”
Aime Césaire has always been a Martinican poet. The beheaded sun. African scream in French. The first hand reaching for the mask is Frantz Fanon's teacher, and even a pioneer early enough to pave the paths for Edward Said to walk. He was 94 years old when he died in Martinique on April 17, 2008. A dignified struggle, poems, and books remained from his story. Martinique has never forgotten him. “The first decaying place of a civilization is not its head, but its heart,” said Aime Césaire. After reading the Discourse on Colonialism, we can start from here to remember the poet.