Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Black Writers in French
Black Writers in French
LILYAN KESTELOOT
Black Writers
in French
A Literary History
of Negritude
First published as Les ecrivains noirs de languefrangaise: Naissance d'une litterature copyright 1963
by Editions de l’lnstitut de Sociologie de l’Universite Libre de Bruxelles
Since this page cannot accommodate all of the copyright notices, the page that follows
constitutes an extension of the copyright page.
THE THIRD PRESS-JOSEPH OKPAKU PUBLISHING CO., INC.: Quotations from “Le
message,” “Joal,” “Vacances,” “Lettre a un prisonnier,” “Au guelowar,” “Priere de paix,”
“Tyaroye,” and “Le Kaya-Magan,” from Poemes by L. S. Senghor, copyright © 1964 by
Editions du Seuil, are translated by special permission of The Third Press-Joseph Okpaku
Publishing Co., Inc., who hold an English translation copyright © 1974.
Quotations from Les armes miraculenses by Aime Cesaire, copyright © 1970 by Editions
Gallimard, are translated by special permission of The Third Press-Joseph Okpaku Publish¬
ing Co., Inc., who hold an English translation copyright © 1974.
Quotations from “Corps perdu” in Cadastre by Aime Cesaire, copyright © 1961 by
Editions du Seuil, appear in English translation from “Disembodied,” copyright © 1973
by The Third Press-Joseph Okpaku Publishing Co., Inc., by permission.
EDITIONS GALLIMARD: Quotations in French from Les armes miraculeuses by Aime Ce¬
saire, © 1946 by Editions Gallimard, are reprinted and translated by permission of the
publisher.
PRESENCE AFRICAINE: Extracts from Aime Cesaire’s Cahier d'un retour au pays natal,
published by Presence Africaine (Paris) in 1956, are reprinted and translated by permission
of the publisher.
Quotations in French from the edition definitive of L. G. Damas’s Pigments, published by
Presence Africaine (Paris) in 1962, are reprinted by permission. “Treve,” “Rappel,”
“S.O.S.,” “Pour sur,” Savoir-vivre,” Sur une carte postale,” “Des billes pour la roulette,”
“Bientot,” “En hie indienne,” “Regard,” and “Un clochard m’a demande dix sous” from
Pigments are translated by permission.
Acknowledgments / v
ELLEN CONROY KENNEDY: English translations of portions of sixteen other poems from
Leon Damas’s Pigments, “Obsession,” “There Are Nights,” “Sellout,” “Hiccups,” “Real¬
ity,” “Blues,” “The Black Man’s Lament,” “Whitewash,” “If Often,” “Shine,” “Their
Thing,” “Et Cetera,” “Position,” “Like the Legend,” “They Came That Night,” and
“Sleepless Night,” copyright © 1972 by Ellen Conroy Kennedy, appear by permission of
the translator.
LEON DAMAS: The excerpt from Black-Label (Paris: Gallimard, 1956) by Leon Damas is
reprinted and translated by permission of the author.
ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.: “I, Too,” copyright 1926 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., and renewed
1954 by Langston Hughes, is reprinted from Selected Poems by Langston Hughes by permis¬
sion of the publisher.
Lines from “Our Land” and from “Poem—For the Portrait of an African Boy,” copyright
1926 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., and renewed 1954 by Langston Hughes, are reprinted from
The Weary Blues by Langston Hughes by permission of the publisher.
HARCOURT BRACE JOVANOVICH, INC.: Excerpts from Banjo by Claude McKay are
reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., copyright 1929 by Harper and
Brothers, copyright 1967 by Hope McKay Virtue.
TWAYNE PUBLISHERS, INC.: Lines from “If We Must Die” and “The White House” in
Selected Poems of Claude McKay, copyright 1953 by Bookman Associates, are reprinted with
the permission of Twayne Publishers, Inc.
FARRAR, STRAUS Sc GIROUX, INC.: Passages from The Big Sea by Langston Hughes,
copyright 1940 by Langston Hughes, are reprinted with the permission of Farrar, Straus
Sc Giroux, Inc.
HARPER Sc ROW, PUBLISHERS, INC.: The poem “Incident” and lines from “Heritage,”
both copyright 1925 by Harper Sc Row, Publishers, Inc., renewed 1953 by Ida M. Cullen;
and lines from “From the Dark Tower,” copyright 1927 by Harper Sc Row, Publishers, Inc.,
renewed 1955 by Ida M. Cullen, are from On These I Stand by Countee Cullen and are
reprinted by permission of the publisher.
Contents
Illustrations ix
Translator’s Preface xi
Translator’s Introduction xiii
Preface 3
Introduction 7
I THE BEGINNINGS
1 Legitime Defense: A Manifesto 15
2 West Indian Literature in French: “A Tracing Paper
Poetry” 19
3 Surrealism and Criticism of the West 37
4 Communism and the Black Man 46
5 Black Students in Paris and the Harlem Renaissance 56
6 Rene Maran and Batouala 75
II NEGRITUDE IS BORN
7 L'Etudiant Non: A Forum for the New Ideas 83
8 How the Ethnologists Helped 93
9 Negritude: Some Definitions, Sartre’s Negativity 102
vii
viii/CONTENTS
V AN END TO COLONIZATION_
19 In Paris: Founding Presence Afncaine 279
20 The Nature and Influence of Presence Afncaine 288
21 Black French-Language Writers in 1960: A Survey 298
22 A New Generation and the Negritude Label 317
VI CONCLUSIONS_
23 A Contribution to the Larger Humanism 335
IX
Translator's Preface
xi
xii / TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE
E.C.K.
Columbia, Maryland
Translator's Introduction
xiii
xiv / TRANSLATOR S INTRODUCTION
1. Shadow and Act (New York: New American Library, Signet, 1964), p. 255: “It is not
culture which binds the peoples who are of partially African origin now scattered
throughout the world, but an identity of passions.”
Translator’s Introduction / xv
duced one, too, in 19472), the three elder poets (Damas, Senghor,
Cesaire) continued to attract attention as they published in France
through the 1950s. Although the African novel in French was also
developing significantly toward the close of the decade, poetry had
become so popular a medium that every francophone black (see note
10 below) seemed to try his hand at it. Many, particularly students,
published verse in the traditionally short-lived student reviews or in
Presence Afncaine; some achieved the flattering distinction of having
their verse gathered in individual paperbound volumes. Among these
newer poets, some composed a few good poems; a handful had real
talent. Others turned out heartfelt verses, and their respectful emula¬
tion of their elders was sometimes signalled by a dedication line, “to
L.S.S.,” “for L.D.,” “A.C.,” or perhaps “J.R.” (Jacques Roumain).
Usually the themes, vocabulary, and imagery alone were familiar
enough to make their inspiration apparent. The literary value of much
of this derivative verse was nil. But its consciousness-raising value was
great. However hotly debated it was in French-speaking African and
West Indian circles, “negritude” became an umbrella concept, a ban¬
ner of black identity. It was never without political ramifications, yet
its adherents encompassed a spectrum of political persuasions. One of
its two principal exponents, Aime Cesaire, was a member of the French
Communist Party until the ill-fated Hungarian Revolution; the other,
Leopold Sedar Senghor, though long an advocate of African indepen¬
dence, politically has always stood close to the conservative Gaullists.
European literary critics from Desnos to Sartre were aware of the
moral and political, as well as the psychological, implications of the
new black poetry in French. However, the German criticjanheinzjahn,
in Muntu: An Outline of Neo-African Culture (Diisseldorf, 1958), rhapso¬
dized—in a fascinating but probably misleading manner—on certain
pan-African mystical, philosophical properties that he felt black poetry
in French shared with nearly every other kind of “African” writing.
In contrast, Les ecnvains nous de langue frangaise, appearing several
years later, was refreshingly unpretentious and straightforward.
Rather than hazard sweeping philosophical conclusions, Kesteloot’s
modest goal was to trace the history of an idea and survey the school
of poetry and essays that expressed it. She combined the sound disci¬
pline and research methods of history and sociology, as well as tradi¬
tional French literary criticism. While she too was European and Euro¬
pean-educated, Kesteloot had been raised in the former Belgian
Congo, and was the first European critic to combine a good grounding
in the recent cultural history of France with lengthy, firsthand, not
merely textbook, experience of Africa.
3. See Melville Herskovits, The Myth of the Negro Past (Boston: Beacon Press, 1941,
1964); and The New World Negro (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1966). The late
American cultural anthropologist was a pioneer in the field study of advanced West
African cultures and of their survival in the Caribbean, Central and South America as
well as in the United States. His work did much to dispel myths and erroneous assump¬
tions of earlier lay observers, establishing that New World Negroes do have a rich and
valuable African past.
xviii / TRANSLATOR S INTRODUCTION
on the early poetry of each of the three founding fathers. Here the
personalities and backgrounds of Damas, Cesaire, and Senghor are
compared and contrasted. Kesteloot examines the form, rhythm, im¬
ages, vocabulary, and style of each of these highly individual but
nonetheless closely related poets. In so doing, I find that she under¬
lines, perhaps inadvertently, the extent to which the poets differ in
style, form, and temperament, despite the fact that they draw on group
themes. Kesteloot seems to disprove Senghor’s oft-repeated assertion
that “the negritude in poetry is more a matter of style than of theme.”
In Part IV, Kesteloot returns to a narrative account of the extrapoeti-
cal activities through which each of the three leaders continued to
develop and promulgate their ideas. In 1938, on his return to Paris
from held work he had supervised for the Musee d’Ethnographie (now
the Musee de l’Homme), Leon Damas published Retour de Guyane. The
book was an indictment of France for having permitted his colonial
homeland, largely because of its infamous penal colony, to become a
“septic tank for the mother country.” Damas attacked the French
cultural-assimilation policy for alienating the Guianese elite from their
responsibility to the masses. But despite its careful documentation, the
work was received as a polemic. Damas’s candor was years ahead of its
time.
In 1939, not long after Damas’s Retour de Guyane, Senghor was asked
to contribute to a church-sponsored volume, L ’homme de couleur, char¬
acterized by its idealistic and paternalistic view of France’s colonizing
mission, a view still prevalent outside the black group. The courteous,
tactful tone of Senghor’s article, “Ce que l’homme noir apporte”
(“What the black man brings”), offered subtle but potent argument
against “the state of intellectual degradation and moral depravity”
then presumed characteristic of African peoples generally. To a Euro¬
pean audience on the eve of World War II—threatened by the aggres¬
sion of police states practicing race genocide and in a time of industri¬
alization where workers were beginning to feel like machines—
Senghor wrote of harmonious and peaceful African civilizations with
“moral values where love, charity, and clan solidarity are preeminent,”
of respect for the elders and ancestors, of democratic government by
palavers, the working of the soil, the beauty and usefulness of African
art. The African will choose to assimilate what he wishes from the
West, but do not expect him to assimilate it in toto, Senghor advised.
The societies created by blacks, he implies, are every bit as good as
those the West wishes to impose, and in them the black man can attain
his full stature. As the war drew closer, ideas the group had debated
for several years, explored in their student journal L'Etudiant Non, and
in their more intimate writings, began to reach out to a wider audience,
whether through poetry or prose.
xx/TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION
world festival will take place for the first time outside the francophone
sphere, under the sponsorship of the Nigerian government, appears to
demonstrate that negritude’s central premise, the existence of a cul¬
tural relationship among peoples of the black world, is increasingly
viable and relevant.
The last two sections of Kesteloot’s volume, parts V and VI, are no
longer current, yet they are no less interesting when viewed as recent
history. Part V is Kesteloot’s analysis of her 1960 survey of some forty
black writers in French, representing two generations, from Africa, the
Caribbean, and Madagascar. French colonization was at an end.
Guinea was already independent; Senegal, Mali, Dahomey, Cameroon,
Ivory Coast, and others were soon to follow. Decolonization was al¬
ready a much-discussed word in anticipation of the spiritual and intel¬
lectual change that would follow the end to political colonization.
By personal interviews and a detailed questionnaire, Kesteloot at¬
tempted to get a collective picture of the goals and motives of these
forty intellectuals; the literary and ideological influences on their work;
their degree of commitment or lack of commitment to the writer’s role
as a mediator in the decolonization process. She was particularly inter¬
ested in the younger writers’ reaction to “negritude.” Many were un¬
comfortable with the term, which they perceived as a label for certain
outmoded attitudes of an older generation. They preferred to speak
of “African personality’’—a-rose-by-any-other-name which appeared
to mean much the same thing.
At the same time Kesteloot found an astonishing homogeneity of
themes in their writings (the suffering of the slave past, resentment of
the evils of colonization—poverty, hunger, forced labor, the exploita¬
tion of great masses, nostalgia for the traditional life) and a continuing
emphasis on group or mass themes, however personal their expres¬
sion, whether in poetry (from Damas’s Pigments, 1937, and Jacques
Roumain’s Bois d’ebene, 1945, to David Diop’s Coups de Pilon, 1956, and
Rene Depestre’s Mineral non, 1956); the essay (particularly Fanon’s
Peau noire, masques blancs, 1952); or novels (such as Mongo Beti’s Mission
terminee, 1957, Ferdinand Oyono’s Une vie de boy, 1956, or Ousmane
Sembene’s Les bouts de bois de Dieu, 1960). There were exceptions, of
course, but even when the writer spoke for himself alone, or for a
particular small group or place, there was an overtone of the whole—
the black man in general.
In the francophone world, the literary explosion of the fifteen years
just prior to African independence has not been matched. Since 1960,
the older, established poets have continued to create, but at a less
intense pace, and without the same impact. In literature at least, others
have remained silent (Birago Diop, Jacques Rabemananjara, Paul Ni¬
ger, Guy Tirolien). Among the younger poets, David Diop was lost at
xxii/TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION
among black writings in the United States, The Wretched of the Earth sells
second only to The Autobiography of Malcolm X and ranks among the
sacred writings in black American militant circles. Kesteloot knew Fa-
non as an essayist and thinker for Peau noire, masques blancs and from
his contributions to Presence Africaine and the black writers’ conferences
in Paris and Rome, but Les damnes de la terre appeared after Kesteloot’s
pioneering study was in production.
Fanon was very much an heir of the negritude generation: He was
shaped at the outset by its thought, and only now is this beginning to
be appreciated in the United States.4 Black Skin, White Masks, striking
in its analysis of the colonized personality, is permeated with the Ce-
saire of Cahier dun retour aupays natal and punctuated throughout with
quotations from the poetry and prose of Cesaire, Damas, Jacques
Roumain, Senghor, Alioune and David Diop. It is the violent spirit of
Cesaire’s Rebel, from his disturbing and prophetic play Et les chiens se
taisaient (“And the dogs fell silent”), on the other hand, that dominates
Fanon’s final testament, The Wretched of the Earth. This last work ap¬
pears to endorse violence, or at the very least struggle, as necessary
to the decolonization process, as the only method by which oppressed
peoples can be restored to a full sense of their authentic selves.5
In part VI of Black Writers in French Kesteloot attempts to summarize
what the leading writers saw as their contribution to a larger human¬
ism. In expressing themselves they have also spoken for others. They
have attempted to use the “decolonization” of Africans and West
Indians as a starting point from which the cultural contributions of
blacks the world over will be seen in relation to one another, and fully
accepted and appreciated “at the universal table.” The latter image is
Senghor’s. He reminds us that the goal toward which mankind strives
in this last quarter of the twentieth century, if we survive it, will not
be complete if it excludes a single people, a single culture. What we
must seek, in his view, is a universal civilization that will legitimize the
Negro’s place at that table, welcoming his unique contributions so
long undervalued. “What all these writers cry out for is therefore not
to reject what the West brought them, not a return to the Africa of
pre-colonial times, closed in upon itself; nor is it to be able to construct
their own world totally separate from the white. What they want is
precisely the opposite: to contribute to the formation of a universal
4. See these recent biographies: Fanon: The Revolutionary as Prophet, by Peter Geismar
(New York: Grove, 1971); Frantz Fanon, by David Caute (New York: Viking, 1970); and
Frantz Fanon: A Critical Study, by Irene L. Gendzier (New York: Pantheon, 1973).
5. This position grew out of Fanon’s experience in the long, bloody Algerian Revolu¬
tion, which he first witnessed as a psychiatrist in a French colonial hospital; later, after
resigning his medical position, he served the Algerian cause in various capacities until
his untimely death in 1961, at age thirty-six of leukemia.
xxiv /TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION
6. Kesteloot, Intellectual Origins of the African Revolution (Washington, D.C.: Black Or¬
pheus Press, 1972), p. 113,
7. Opening speech at the Second Conference of Black Writers and Artists, p. 44,
quoted in ibid.
Translator’s Introduction / xxv
8. Important work has, of course, also been published in this field by non-Africans.
Among ground-breaking works which analyze, transcribe, and translate vernacular, oral
African literary forms into English are: Tzibongo: Zulu Praise Poems, by Trevor Cope
(1968), and Somali Poetry: An Introduction, by the linguist-anthropologist team, B. W.
Andrzejewski and T. M. Lewis (1964), both in the Oxford Library of African Literature,
London; Dahomean Narrative: A Cross-Cultural Analysis, by Melville J. and Frances S. Her-
skovits (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1958); and A Recitation of Ifa,
Oracle of the Yoruba, by Judith Gleason (New York: Grossman, 1973).
xxvi/TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION
9. Among these are Kaydara, rent initiatique peul (“Kaydara, Peuhl initiation story”) in
collaboration with Amadou Hampate Ba (Paris: Julliard, 1969); La poesie traditionelle and
L'epopee traditionelle (Paris: Fernand Nathan, 1971); Da monzon de Segou, epopee barnbara,
with J. B. Traore, Amadou Traore, and A. Hampate Ba (Paris: Fernand Nathan and
Cahier de l’Homme, 1972); L'eclat de I'etoile, recit initiatique peul, with Amadou Hampate
Ba, Classiques Africains (Paris: Armand Colin, 1973); and La pnse de Dkonkolom, episode
bilingue de l'epopee bambara, with Gerard Dumestre and Jean Baptiste Traore, Classiques
Africains (Paris: Armand Colin, 1973).
Translator’s Introduction / xxvii
from the Caribbean and Africa were forming a new literature, which,
though indebted to the mainstream of French writing, needed to be
seen as a separate entity, as well as in relationship to other black
literatures (the Harlem Renaissance, for example) which had in¬
fluenced it and which it, in turn, would influence. This critical work was
a major and valuable contribution to black literary studies, which Kes-
teloot certainly helped launch, to comparative literature, to modern
intellectual history, and to what the French have recently begun to
promote as francophome.10
Black writings in French are already receiving serious attention in
Europe, Africa, the Caribbean, and Japan, as well as in the United
States. And as black literary studies continue to develop, we can look
forward to more English translations of the leading writers in French
(as well as to keeping existing translations in print) and to supportive
critical work from a growing cadre of international scholars. In addi¬
tion to critiques on genre,11 there will undoubtedly be searching stud¬
ies of individual writers, perhaps investigations of such longstanding
literary and intellectual relationships as the near forty-year friendship
of Cesaire and Senghor, two men of intriguingly different personalities
and political persuasions. Eventually there will be biographies, per¬
haps published correspondence, collections from magazines such as
Presence Afncaine and others. It is ironic (publication being the haphaz¬
ard process that it is) that Whispers from a Continent (1969), Wilfred
Cartey’s sensitive and highly lyrical appreciation of contemporary
black writing, with its abundant allusions to poets and novelists who
wrote in French, was published before works of most of those poets and
writers appeared in English, and several years before so helpful an
auxiliary guide as the present Kesteloot volume was available as back¬
ground.
Aime Cesaire proclaimed some thirty-five years ago in Cahier dun
retour au pays natal that it is “bon et beau et legitime d’etre negre”
(“good and beautiful and legitimate to be black”). Public acceptance
10. The French-speaking Universite Laval in Quebec has established a study center
and a magazine to further francophonie. Theoretically, and viewed from the most inoffen¬
sive perspective, this is the principle by which the French, acknowledging the cultural
originality of various peoples of former French dominions, seek to encourage their
cultural ties to one another, rather than with the metropole alone, by means of their
common language. French Canadians, West Indians, Africans, Madagascans, Mauri¬
tians, Southeast Asians, and North Africans fall within their scope of interest. Having
had Cesaire, Damas, and Kesteloot as visiting lecturers, FUniversite Laval, not surpris¬
ingly, has shown a marked interest in the literature of negritude.
11. At this writing, in the United States we have had three book-length studies of the
African novel, by Gleason, Tucker, and Larson (see bibliography) and no less than four
anthologies devoted exclusively to black poetry in French, by editors Shapiro, Collins,
Jones, and Kennedy (see bibliography).
xxvin / TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION
12. Popular feeling on this issue has grown so strong that the venerable Association
for the Study of Negro Life and History (founded in 1915) recently changed ‘‘Negro”
in its name to “Afro-American.”
Translator’s Introduction / xxix
with a small w and black with a small b seem the generally accepted
terms. “Afro-American” is another current term, less universal than
“black” in that it confines itself to Western hemisphere blacks, leaving
out Africans. The official posters from the 1966 festival in Dakar read,
in their English edition, “First World Festival of Negro Arts.” On the
other hand, the advance notices of the second festival, scheduled for
Fagos in 1975—with Alioune Diop and one or two other “high priests
of negritude” serving on its sponsoring committees—speak of “The
Second World Festival of Black Art and Culture.”
This volume, we concluded, cannot and should not shun the term.
To avoid whatever confusion the word “negritude” may evoke, let me
point out that Mme Kesteloot’s book neither endorses nor rejects an
ethno-mysticism the word may suggest. She has simply sought to pre¬
sent a set of ideas and trace their origins, and she does so by means
of an admirably objective historical study and sensitive literary analy¬
sis. Quite apart from whether one accepts, rejects, or remains indiffer¬
ent to negritude as a mystique, Kesteloot introduces three important
poets whose works have their own social and aesthetic values, and she
alludes to other writers she was not able to treat in similar depth. By
examining the situation of French-speaking Africans and black West
Indians toward the end of the colonial era, by describing the ferment
of their university years and early adulthood, Black Writers in French
illuminates an exciting cultural and intellectual movement. The events
of the late 1930s and World War II provided the impetus for a new
group literature, launched by a handful of poets and through which a
new international self-awareness and race-awareness, the dynamic and
useful complex of ideas they eventually called “negritude,” was born.
Black Writers in French
This study was written between 1958 and 1961. It has never
been revised, ana, since it was the first study synthesizing the history
of the negritude movement, one will notice in it today a certain num¬
ber of inaccuracies and oversights. I should like to point these out
myself, as well as to call attention to the work of colleagues who since
then have made important clarifications. In fifteen years, moreover,
the literature has been enriched by new and not lesser writers and has
taken the new directions outlined in my Anthologie negro-afncaine (Brus¬
sels: Editions Marabout, 1967). Numerous colleagues have written
articles and essays that are of capital importance in assessing the pre¬
sent status of black literature.
Let me begin with a few corrections of my own work. Well-informed
readers have kindly pointed out some errors. Before it appeared in
Haiti, the magazine Lucioles had been created in Fort-de-France by a
group of Martinique.! writers, among them Gilbert Gratiant. The Ca-
hier d'un retour au pays natal appears to have been conceived after a
return trip Cesaire made to his country in about 1936. My interpreta¬
tion of the passage that begins “Partir!” [“To leave!’’], ending the
description of the West Indies, is therefore open to discussion. Does
the passage concern a departure from the West Indies for Europe, as
I then understood it, or, on the other hand, a departure from France
for Martinique, corresponding to the return visit Cesaire had recently
made? It is in this latter sense that Georges Ngal has interpreted the
passage in his thesis at the University of Geneva, “L’evolution psy-
chologique et intellectuelle d’Aime Cesaire.”
I have been reproached a number of times for not giving more
attention to La Revue du Monde Noir, which preceded Legitime Defense by
two years. It is true that I ought to have examined more closely the
activity and influence of this little magazine, of which there were six
issues. Messrs Okechukwu Mezu, Georges Ngal, and Tidjani Serpos
(the latter in his 1973 thesis at Vincennes, “L’ideologie de la negritude
chez Senghor”) have since accomplished this remarkably well. How¬
ever, with me it was less an oversight (for I do mention the review
3
4/PREFACE
directed by Mile Paulette Nardal and Dr. Leo Sajous) than a mistake
in judgment. With further research I would have seen that Legitime
Defense, despite its ideological opposition to La Revue du Monde Non,
was not so distant from it; that Etienne Lero, by participating in La
Revue, had become acquainted with the Negro Renaissance writers
among whom he counted himself; that despite its middle-class and
assimilationist orientation, La Revue du Monde Noir nonetheless
launched two of the major themes of negritude: the ennoblement of
the Negro race and the revaluation of African civilizations.
Another misjudgment in my study was the slight importance I ac¬
corded Jacques Roumain and the Cuban writer, Nicolas Guillen. Even
though they did not participate personally in the current of ideas that
centered about L ’Etudiant Non, their works and their activities strongly
influenced several of the negritude writers. There are very recogniz¬
able traces of Roumain in Cesaire and Senghor, in David Diop s Coups
de pilon, in J. F. Brierre’s Black Soul, in the poems of Rene Belance, and
even among the new generation, in the Haitian Gerard Chenet s Zombis
negres and in the Congolese Tchicaya U Tam si s Epitome.
I think, too, that I underestimated writers like Andre Gide and
Albert Londres, whose works, like those of Rene Maran, bore lucid and
courageous witness to the price of colonization. Leon Fanoud Siefer s
L'Image du non dans la litterature franqaise (Paris: Klincksieck, 1968) and
J.-M. Abanda Ndengue’s De la negritude au negrisme (Yaounde: Editions
C.L.E., 1970) have given these writers their true place in the history
of negritude, just as J. P. Goldenberg’s thesis on Blaise Cendrars at the
University of Paris has demonstrated Cendrars’s fascination with Afri¬
can civilization.
Lastly, this book suffers from the faults common to works that break
new ground: errors of perspective. One looks backward, often simpli¬
fying and idealizing, and is likely to do the same looking forward
toward the future. Re-reading my concluding chapter I am struck by
its naive optimism. I scarcely foresaw the problems of Africa today,
nor, consequently, the impasses and difficulties black writers now en¬
counter.
Also, on the political, social, and economic levels, one must re-read
the works of Frantz Fanon, particularly The Wretched of the Earth and
Toward the African Revolution. Important, too, are Rene Dumont’s L'A-
frique est mal par tie, Albert Meister s East Africa: The Past in Chains, the
Future in Pawn (New York: Walker, 1968), Yves Benot s Les ideologies
africaines, Mahjemout Diop’s Histone des classes sociales dans 1 Afnque de
1 Vuest, all of Samir Amin’s work, and Guy L. Hazoume’s recent study
Ideologies tribalistes et nations en Afnque (Paris: Presence Africaine, 1972).
The range in African critical thinking on literature and ideology in
recent years is illustrated by Marcien Towa s Essai sur la problematique
Preface / 5
Lilyan Kesteloot
Paris
November 1973
*Translator’s note: Mme Kesteloot’s preface reached us after most of this volume had
gone to press. Since several of the new critics and scholars to whom she calls attention
are not included in our bibliography, I will mention here some of their works: The
Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright by Michel Fabre, translated by Isabel Barzun (New York:
Morrow, 1973); Theatre et nationalisme: Wole Soyinka et Leroi Jones by Alain Ricard (Paris:
Presence Africaine, 1972); Individuality et collectivite dans le roman negro-afncain d'expression
firanqaise by Bernard Mouralis (Editions de l’Universite d’Abidjan, 1969); L'humamsme
dans le theatre d’Aime Cesaire by Rodney Harris (Sherbrooke, Quebec: Editions Antoine
Naamen, 1973); and The Concept of Negntude in the Poetry of Leopold Sedar Senghor by Sylvia
Washington Ba (Princeton University Press, 1973).
Introduction
7
8 / INTRODUCTION
culture, we may, along with Aime Cesaire,1 look upon the appearance
of literary works in the colonies as a symptom of their rebirth, and as
proof that colonial peoples are capable of taking the initiative and
reexamining their concept of a world thrown into confusion by coloni¬
zation. Is it not above all the task of writers and artists—those whom
Cesaire calls “men of culture”—to bring order from this chaos? It is
they who catalyze the aspirations of the masses, helping them to regain
their place in history, strengthening their national feeling—in other
words, preparing them for freedom. This major role of elites was
described with considerable foresight by Cesaire in 1959 at the black
writers’ congress in Rome.
In our present situation we are propagators of souls, multipliers of souls,
and almost inventors of souls.
And I say too that it is the mission of the man of black culture to prepare
a good decolonization, not just any kind of decolonization.
For even in the midst of colonial society, it is the man of culture who must
shorten his people’s apprenticeship in liberty. And the man of culture, whether
writer, poet, or artist, achieves this for his people because, within the colonial
situation itself, the creative cultural activity which precedes the concrete col¬
lective experience is already an apprenticeship.2
4. Important personalities of color such as Rene Maran, Dr. Jean Price-Mars, Claude
McKay, Dr. Sajous, Mile Paulette Nardal, and the Achille brothers contributed to this
essentially cultural little magazine.
10/ INTRODUCTION
who seem to have influenced the young black authors of 1960. Each
group was represented at each stage of the movement’s development
by a newspaper or a review. We shall first study the reactions of the
Legitime Defense group to traditional West Indian literature, to Ameri¬
can Negro writers, to communism, and to surrealism. We shall then
show what Senghor, Cesaire, and Damas thought of their elders, how
they laid the foundations of today’s negritude, propagated their ideas
in the newspaper L ’Etudiant Non, and created the first works of the new
Negro literature. We shall also show how the action begun in Paris was
carried on by Cesaire, upon his return to Martinique, in the little
magazine Tropiques.
Our study will therefore be both a history and an analysis: a history
of the Negro cultural movement born about 1932 in a Parisian univer¬
sity milieu and flourishing today among a multitude of original writers;
an analysis of the influences which nourished the movement, its domi¬
nant themes, the interaction of personalities, of the magazines and
writings by means of which black writers formed an ideology and a
style synthesizing the double culture—French and African—of which
they are the heirs. Finally, this study is an analysis of the continuity
between contemporary literature of the Presence Afncaine school and
the first Negro intellectuals who laid its foundations when colonialism
was at its zenith.
We hope to demonstrate that black writers became truly original
only after they had committed themselves. A French West Indian liter¬
ature had existed for more than a century—a literature devoid of value
because it was created in a state of complete subjugation to the mother
country’s prestigious culture. The present movement produces mas¬
terpieces in French only when the black writer, having discovered his
own identity, gives free rein to his sensibility and his vision of the
world, and does not try to imitate the European classics. It is in this
that he commits himself. It is not only himself that he expresses but
all Negro peoples in all parts of the world. He expresses an African
soul which before had found written expression only in certain ethno¬
logical works such as those by Frobenius, Bauman, or Griaule.
From the moment they realized and accepted their “Negro” condi¬
tion, black writers—stirred by an immense desire to express this condi¬
tion and lead their peoples to freedom—were able to create a literature
with its own characteristics whose ultimate appeal lies in the universal¬
ity of its values.
I THE BEGINNINGS
The first of June, 1932: on the bright red cover of a
slender booklet, large black letters spell out “Legitime Defense ” (“Right¬
ful vindication” or “Legitimate defense”). The admonitions of the first
few pages look very much like a manifesto. Declaring themselves
“suffocated by this capitalistic, Christian, bourgeois world,” a few
young colored natives of Martinique, students in Paris, aged twenty to
twenty-three, are determined no longer “to compromise with the dis¬
grace surrounding them.” To attain this end, they propose to use the
new arms that the West itself is offering: communism and surrealism.
Choosing as masters Marx, Freud, Rimbaud, and Breton, they declare
war on that “abominable system of coercion and restrictions which
destroys love and delimits dreams, generally known as Western civili¬
zation.” Above all, they vehemently attack the bourgeoisie of the West
Indies, who seem to them a stiff, unnatural, and ridiculous reflection
of the impugned Western values. In their vocabulary of student
polemic, abuse is intermingled with professions of faith. “Of all the
filthy bourgeois conventions, we particularly despise humanitarian hy¬
pocrisy, the stinking emanation of Christian decay. We hate pity. Senti¬
ment means nothing to us,” the young rebels declare, and, utterly
rejecting the “borrowed personality” worn by blacks and mulattoes of
the West Indian bourgeoisie, these students take the “infernal road of
absolute sincerity.” “We refuse to be ashamed of what we feel.”
In short, and this is the important thing, these young people realize
that, despite their education, they are different from the Europeans
with whom their fathers tried so hard to be assimilated. They see racial
and cultural differences not as a deficiency but rather as a fruitful
promise. Their words are addressed to all black West Indians, they
claim, rather than merely to the bourgeois mulattoes: “We consider
15
16/THE BEGINNINGS
that they especially suffer from capitalism, and because their ethics are
materially determined that they seem to offer a generally greater po¬
tential for revolt and joy.”
In the West Indies of 1932, this manifesto proposed the absolute
reversal of a solidly established hierarchy of values, a system which was
still causing pain in countries already independent, like Haiti. In the
preceding century, Victor Schoelcher had written with lucidity: No
man with African blood in his veins can ever do enough to rehabilitate
the name of Negro, which slavery has shamed. One might call it a filial
duty. The day when mulatto men and particularly mulatto women call
themselves black will mark the disappearance of that discrimination
contrary to the laws of fraternity and fraught with future misfortunes.
Let us face this and never forget it, dear fellow citizens and friends.
This is the virus which is now destroying the people of Haiti and
leading them to ruin.”1
It is remarkable that this reversal of values—the first step toward the
recognition of negritude—should have been accomplished by young,
idealistic intellectuals2 who were themselves the product of a bour¬
geois background based on color discrimination and the exploitation
of the masses. With the exception of Etienne Lero, all the young
contributors to Legitime Defense were mulattoes and belonged “under
protest” to the very bourgeoisie they so bitterly criticized. Holders of
government scholarships or sons of well-to-do officials, they risked
losing their means of support, for the periodical had caused a tremen¬
dous scandal in the West Indies, outraging their families and friends.
This violent reaction, however, proved to the authors that they had
touched the heart of the matter.
Of far greater importance to us, however, was the influence of Legi¬
time Defense on black students in Paris. It went far beyond the West
Indian circle and reached the Africans.3 Already the little periodical
presented completely and coherently all the ideas which would grow
into the French-speaking black cultural renaissance: a critique of ra¬
tionalism, the need to regain an original personality, the rejection of
an art subservient to European standards, revolt against colonial capi¬
talism.
The principal founders of this renaissance—Cesaire, Senghor and
Leon Damas—were directly influenced by these themes. Senghor, who
was older than the others and had lived longer in Paris, was in close
contact with the group. Leon Damas devoted three pages of his anthol¬
ogy to the work and personality of Etienne Lero, whom he knew well
and admired.4 Senghor confirms Aime Cesaire’s interest in the young
manifesto: “When Jules Monnerot, Etienne Lero and Rene Menil
hurled the manifesto Legitime Defense at the West Indian bourgeoisie,
Aime Cesaire, then a ‘Khagne’ student at the lycee Louis-le-Grand, was
the first to hear it and to listen to it. Realizing that this message must
be thoroughly studied, he turned, on the one hand, to French sources,
Rimbaud and Lautreamont, and, on the other hand, to his own
sources, to his ‘Bambara ancestors,’ to Negro African poetry.”5 Seng¬
hor acknowledges the importance of Etienne Lero’s group:6 “More
than a magazine, more than a cultural group, Legitime Defense was a
cultural movement. Starting with a Marxist analysis of Island society,
he revealed the West Indian as the descendant of Negro African slaves,
held for three centuries in the stupefying condition of a proletariat.
Surrealism alone, he declared, could liberate him from his taboos and
allow him complete expression. We were a long way from Lucioles. ”7
4. Leon Damas, Poetes d'expression franqaise (Paris: Seuil, Editions Pierres Vives, 1947).
5. L. S. Senghor, Anthologie de la nouvelle poesie negre et malgache de langue franqaise (Paris:
PUF, 1948), p. 55. It was normal that A. Cesaire, also from Martinique, should feel and
rebel in the same manner as the authors of Legitime Defense. As regards his ties with
surrealism and later with communism, they came too late to be laid to the influence of
the periodical. They can be explained more logically by the character of the writer and
his Martinique environment.
6. Ibid., p. 49.
7. Lucioles was a small periodical founded in 1927 by the Haitian Leon Laleau, in favor
of a more national poetry.
8. J. Monnerot, the only one of the team who remained in Paris, replied very curtly
to our request for information, saying that “he wished to have no dealings with these
people and had nothing to say!” J. Monnerot now professes extreme right opinions.
9. Paris: Gallimard, 1945, 5th reprint.
10. See part III below, entirely devoted to the periodical Tropiques.
18/THE BEGINNINGS
The role of the group was essentially to launch and discuss ideas
which were only brought to literary fruition later on by Cesaire, Seng-
hor, and Damas—a team to which the Legitime Defense group, after
several years of refining its position, finally yielded its place. After
Legitime Defense, there was no longer any question that West Indian
literature in French was stagnant, and that both more authentic art and
more authentic social behavior were called for.
With Legitime Defense the New Negro movement in French letters was
officially inaugurated. This is why we believe it will be useful to analyze
both its content and its sources.
xL West Indian Literature
/ in French:
/ "A Tracing Paper Poetry"
1. Unless otherwise indicated, all the quotations at the beginning of this chapter are
taken from Legitime Defense. For Rene Meml: “Generalites sur l’ecrivain de couleur
antillais,” pp. 7-9. For Etienne Lero: “Misere d’une poesie,” pp. 10-12.
19
20/THE BEGINNINGS
2. In 1932, West Indian poets were still patterning themselves on the French Parnas¬
sian school and had not followed the evolution of poetry toward realism, naturalism, and
symbolism.
West Indian Literature in French / 21
3. Dr. Jean Price-Mars, De Saint-Domingue a Haiti, an essay on culture, arts, and litera¬
ture (Paris: Presence Africaine, 1959).
22 /THE BEGINNINGS
4. Ibid., p. 91.
West Indian Literature in French / 23
Oswald Durand can hardly be criticized for writing like Victor Hugo
before Andre Breton was born. He can, however, be criticized for
aping a fashionable French author without adding any personal touch
of his own. What is deplorable is that critics should have judged his
merits only according to the degree of his “depersonalization.”
As faithfully as they had followed the romantic school, West Indian
writers next imitated the Parnassian. Leconte de Lisle, Francois Cop-
pee, Sully Prudhomme, and, at best, Baudelaire were the undisputed
masters for so long that as late as 1945 Herald L. C. Roy was able to
write the following verses:
Le soleil me surprit chez ces vieilles catins
Ou le Rappel deja basculait son tocsin
Reveillant quelque enfant tres belle mais trop here
Glacee a mon desir comme une fleur de pierre.5
Let us now see what Auguste Viatte, the author of a very thorough
literary history of Haiti and the Lesser Antilles, has to say. The ex¬
cerpts we have given prove that this literature is definitely in the
French style and without originality. However, far from branding these
bonds with his country as “alienating,” Mr. Viatte happily collects
Haitian intellectuals’ statements praising “the glorious destiny of
Canada and the French West Indies to preserve the traditions and the
language of France.”6 “The greatest country of the black man is
France . . . for it must be repeated that the first time a man of the black
race was a citizen, he was a French citizen; the first time a man of our
race was an officer, he was a French officer. And where is our birth
certificate? Is it not in France, in the Declaration of the Rights of
Man?”7 Or again: “Anything which can serve to strengthen
French influence, harmless politically, seems to us worth encourag¬
ing.”8
Mr. Viatte is also very lenient toward authors such as Daniel Thaly
9. Ida Faubert, Coeur des lies (Paris, 1939). Quoted in A. Viatte’s study, p. 453.
* Translator’s note: la presence fran^aise, as distinct, for example, from la presence
afncaine.
10. Auguste Viatte, Histoire litteraire, pp. 498-99.
26/THE BEGINNINGS
Actually the influence of Price-Mars and the Revue des Gnots bore
important literary fruit only after 1930, with Leon Laleau s Le choc
(“The impact,” 1932), in which he describes the consequences of the
American occupation*, with the peasant novels of Jean-Baptiste Cineas
(1936) or Jacques Roumain (1934), which deeply affected the entire
younger generation of his country.19
If the negritude movement found a fairly well-prepared soil in Haiti,
the situation was considerably different in the Lesser Antilles. In 1925,
Emmanuel Flavia-Leopold had appreciated and translated the black
American poets Langston Hughes and Claude McKay. In 1951 Gilbert
Gratiant sang:
19. Jacques Roumain is only known in France for one novel, Gouvemeurs de la rosee,
written in 1944, published in 1946 by the Editeurs Francis Reunis, Pans. [Translator’s
note: published in English as Masters of the Dew (1947; reprinted 1971), trans. Langston
Hughes and Mercer Cook.] A contemporary Haitian writer, Jacques Stephen Alexis,
continues the tradition of the peasant novel.
20. Gilbert Gratiant, Poernes en vers faux (Paris, 1931), p. 76.
West Indian Literature in French / 29
Come ’neath the banana trees, we shall find the shady places
Birds will sing to see our love,
Your long sunshine, your shade and your verdant coolness.]
Heredia (1842-1905):
La-bas ou les Antilles bleues
Se pament sous l’ardeur de l’astre occidental.
Leonard (1744-93):
Quels beaux jours j’ai goutes sur vos rives lointaines
Lieux cheris que mon coeur ne saurait oublier
Antille merveilleuse ou le baume des plaines
Va jusqu’au sein des mers, saisir le nautonier.
■"Translator's note: Gauguin spent 1887 in Martinique, several years before his first
visit to Tahiti.
23. Gilbert Gratiant, Credo des sang-mele, ou Je veux chanter la France (Fort-de-France,
1950).
West Indian Literature in French / 33
[Coffer of kisses
Hummingbird to tourists
Geographic gem
24. Gilbert Gratiant, from an unpublished poem also containing more realistic evoca¬
tions than in the excerpt given above (Negro strikers, social injustice, and exploitation).
Note, however, in spite of his many years standing as a Communist Party member—and
the literary themes this necessarily entailed—Gratiant could not refrain from spontane¬
ously returning to his original exotic style.
34/THE BEGINNINGS
Familiar Jack-in-the-box
25. Rene Menil, “Sur l’exotisme colonial,” in the Nouvelle Critique, May 1959, p. 139.
26. Haiti won its independence in 1804, whereas Martinique and Guadeloupe are to
this day French states, in which slavery was abolished only in 1848.
27. Leon Damas, Poetes d'expression frangaise, p. 9.
West Indian Literature in French / 35
28. Suzanne Cesaire, Misere d une poesie: John-Antoine Nau,” in Tropiques (Fort-de-
France), no. 4, 1941.
36/THE BEGINNINGS
[And within the inert city, the noisy crowd so surprisingly missing the point
of its noise . . . making insouciant detours from its true cry, the only one one
would want to hear cried because one feels it is this town s belonging to it
alone . . . within this inert city, within this crowd that overlooks its cries of
hunger, misery, revolt and hate, this crowd so strangely talkative and mute.]
Such were West Indian poets, “strangely talkative and mute, failing
to hear their own cry, singing instead of an old life, deceptively
smiling.”32
29. Rene Menil, “Naissance de notre art,” in Tropiques, no. 1, April 1944.
30. Aime Cesaire, Introduction to issue no. 1 of Tropiques.
31. Paris: Presence Africaine, 1956, p. 27.
32. Ibid., p. 26.
Surrealism and Criticism
of the West
37
38/THE BEGINNINGS
up. New foliage grew in the ruined palaces of sentiment and rhetoric.
A jungle of wild plants, their roots drawing strength from the uncon¬
scious and their strange shapes breaking all known rules of botany,
fertilized the fields of rubble—the rums of the ever heavier construc¬
tions of a civilization which, from a surfeit of rational humanism, had
drowned in the habitual.
Thought, sensitivity, imagination, had fashioned themselves into
veritable laws which at last proved suffocating. The surrealists made
a clean sweep of these laws in order to return to sincerity.”7
Literary revolution, the freeing of style and the imagination, the
debunking aspect of a movement then at its zenith, would inevitably
attract those young people disgusted by the “rigidity and datedness,”
to quote Etienne Lero, of their islands. Lero declared that a poem
ought to be a ribbon of dynamite.” “It is surrealism’s glory and
strength ever more deeply to have fused poetry and its purpose.” He
explained his idea with a metaphor: “Until she saw her father naked,
a little girl had always confused him with the clothing he wore. Sud¬
denly, naked, he became dark and incomprehensible. This is also true
of prudes with surrealist poetry.”8
To renew sensibilities and imaginations impoverished by rational¬
ism, the surrealists turned to the theories of Freud. Freud’s vision of
a world of children and primitive people seemed specially significant.
Indeed, this vision, not yet cut off from the living strengths of the
unconscious, seemed naturally poetic, piercing straight through ap¬
pearances and the pragmatic. Andre Breton confirmed this appraisal
again in 1946:
In the twentieth century, the European artist, swept along by the reasonable
and the useful, can guard against the drying up of his sources of inspiration
only by returning to a so-called primitive vision, the synthesis of sensorial
perception and mental image. Black sculpture has already been put to brilliant
use. Today it is particularly the plastic arts of the red race that give us access
to a new method of knowledge and correspondence. In his La poesie modeme
et le sacre (“Modern poetry and the sacred”), Monnerot has skillfully demon¬
strated the affinity between surrealist poetry and Indian poetry which, I affirm,
is still as alive and as creative as ever.9
This reevaluation of primitive peoples and their arts did not pass
unnoticed among representatives of races still considered inferior be¬
cause of their nonrational cultures. Senghor well understood that,
since surrealism, it was no longer pejorative to write that “Negroes had
Right from the start, this civilization which had tried to understand and organ¬
ize the world according to pure reason had been a spectacle of massacres,
colonial wars, future wars, internal dissensions. And yet France had its repub¬
lic, Italy its independence, Germany its unity and England its empire. Human¬
ist hopes had become reality; science had enabled man to dominate the uni¬
verse far beyond his hopes. Industry, however, had not liberated man,
freedom had only succeeded in poisoning people with rationalism. A better
world had been hoped for, but it did not come. Human passions had prevented
it. . . .
How this century kept its promises is sufficiently well known: two chaotic
world wars, in which the popular mystiques of nationalism increased at the
same time as the mysticism of literature. .
Disappointment thus endured turned into a pessimism which finally had to
acknowledge that man had been powerless to organize his destiny and had
been vanquished by his errors. ... We shall naturally come to believe that
humanism has steered the wrong course, that man is in fact dominated by
superior forces: fate, instinct, his race, God, or the Devil, and that art too will
abandon the peaceful depiction of a confident and reassuring humanity.
. . . Everything that books, science, and intellectual mastery had promised was
now rejected. Culture itself had been repudiated by reality.16
logical thought and dream, between the conscious and the uncon¬
scious, between the individual and the world around him, are abol¬
ished—that Breton rallies his contemporaries: “Abandon everything.
Abandon Dada. Abandon your wife. Abandon your mistress. Abandon
your hopes and fears. Abandon your children in a forest. Abandon the
prey for the shadow. If necessary, abandon your comfortable life, and
what you are told is your future. Follow the highways and byways. 19
From then on, resolutely turning their backs on systems and meth¬
ods, on conventions of the beaten track, writers and artists will seize
life in the raw as subject for research, convinced that the universe will
not surrender its secret to logical investigation, but only to the blind
questioning of life as it is lived. ”20 Their guides would be the wise men
of Asia or of mysterious Egypt—of those Eastern nations “which live
in continuous communication with the essence of things. 21
It is understandable to what extent this self-criticism of Western
intellectuals supported the claims of the peoples Europe had previ¬
ously enslaved in the name of all the values now declared bankrupt:
Reason, Progress, Science, Culture. The West was destroying itself.
Colonized peoples hastened to help: What they had to gain was their
independence.
So it was not surprising that Legitime Defense should rally to the most
extreme of these movements. Its ambition was less to create a new art
than to attempt “a reform of knowledge and of life”22 through the
medium of art, because “thought can grasp the conceivable, while art
can deal with what is essential.”23 For surrealists, poetry had a spell¬
binding, visionary role. Rimbaud, Nerval, Lautreamont, and Claudel
had already acknowledged this, while, in Germany, Holderlin, Stefan
George, Hofmannsthal, and Rilke proposed “to use poetry as a
metaphysical instrument, playing the role of mediator between man
and his unknown, a role which Christ and the Passion had lost for
many.”24
But this was not the only role of poetry. “Surrealism, the ultimate
product of this poetic attitude, should be an instrument both of action
and of understanding.”25
“A poet seemed to me predestined,” wrote Michel Leiris; “a sort of
demigod designated to carry out this vast mental transformation of a
universe. 26 Taking this idea literally, Rene Menil predicted the advent
of a man “armed with the poetic power ... to disrupt his country’s
social life with a single word.” Language, he added, would have the
power of action, and one might be able to conceive of politics and
morals as “such that each imperative would inevitably receive the
required action because spontaneous natural forces would be un¬
leashed.’’27
This conception of the poet-as-magician restored to each word its
power of “Logos,’’ in harmony with the beliefs of primitive societies
and especially with the African action word. The words of sorcerers
“produced results with the certainty of lightning,” declared Menil.28
The words of a West Indian hungan, a Bantu sorcerer, or a Ruandese
rainmaker were supposed to be just as efficacious. Studying the cos¬
mogony of the Sudanese, one finds the active and creative Word of
God at the origin of the world. He speaks, and his words become the
sea which engenders life. He speaks again, and his words become
woven threads which are the world’s first technique.29
In Les armes miraculeuses Aime Cesaire makes the same magic use of
the word:
Et je dis
et ma parole est paix
et je dis et ma parole est terre
et je dis:
par de savantes herbes le temps glisse
les branches picoraient une paix de flammes vertes.
et la terre respira sous la gaze des brumes
et la terre s’etira. II y eut un craquement
a ses epaules nouees. II y eut dans ses veines
un petillement de feu.30
26. Quoted by Gaetan Picon, in Panorama des idees contemporaines (Paris: Gallimard
1957), p. 712.
27. Rene Menil, “L’action foudroyante,” in Tropiques, October 1941
28. Ibid.
29. As in the Dogon cosmogony, for example: See Marcel Griaule’s Dieu d'eau (Paris:
Edition du Chene, 1948). A comparison can be made with the Book of Genesis. A
worthwhile study could be made of the Word in Africa and the social importance of
He-who-talks-well, comparing them to ideas on surrealism. Georges Balandier has
pointed out the major role of the Word in his study “Litterature de l’Afnque et des
Ameriques noires,” in Histone des literatures 1 (Paris: Encyclopedie de la Pleiade): 1536-
67. As regards the religious aspect of the Word, see G. van der Leeuw, La religion dans
son essence et ses manifestations (Paris: Payot, 1955).
30. Aime Cesaire, “Les pur-sang,’’ in Les armes miraculeuses (Paris: Gallimard, 1946).
44/THE BEGINNINGS
[And I speak
and my word is peace
and I speak and my word is earth.
And I say:
time slips through the learned grasses
the branches will scratch about for a peace of green flames.
And the earth will breathe beneath a gauze of mists
and the earth will stretch out its limbs.
There was a cracking of its stiff shoulders.
There was a crackling of fire in its veins.]
This poetry of knowledge and action innovated by the surrealists
tended, in fact, to be a poetic form of living rather than an aesthetic
style, and it endowed this way of living with exemplary value. It is in
this sense that one can speak of “surrealist morals,” of a “surrealist
man.”31 “We are all moralists,” said Breton.32 Surrealism always de¬
fended the liberties of man. It proposed, among other things, to do
away with “a large number of taboos which are encouraged by a belief
in heaven, racism, and that supreme abjection, the power of money.”33
This again coincided with black aspirations. The more so since surreal¬
ists, on the social plane, necessarily adopted leftist tendencies34 and
violently criticized bourgeois society. It is no coincidence that almost
every French surrealist at one time or another belonged to the Com¬
munist Party.
“A decadent bourgeois world ... a ruling class which had lost faith
in its mission, outdated ideals, depreciated values. From the very be¬
ginning of the movement, surrealists had encountered the Marxist
explanation of their misery, and been tempted’ by communism. . . .
Strikes, riots, anti-imperialist, antimilitarist, and anticlerical demon¬
strations created around the young communist movement a climate
which young dissenting bourgeois found most attractive.”35
demands for an art conforming to “socialist realism,” and a total ignorance of aesthetic
problems. The party placed the accent on the understandable and the useful, the very
things the surrealist revolution had rejected. Before tribunals often composed of for¬
eigners who spoke very poor French, surrealists were called upon to justify a certain
painting or poem, reports Breton. And when Breton published in his journal a drawing
by Picasso or an article by Ferdinand Alquie of which the party did not approve, he was
faced with questionnaires and remonstrances, and finally had to retract and apologize.
This communist experience was a great disappointment for most surrealists, although
several remained faithful to the party despite everything, as in the case of Aragon, even
to the detriment of their art.
36. J. P. Sartre, Orphee noir,” preface to the Anthologie de la nouvelle poesie negre et
malgache de langue franqaxse (Paris: PUF, 1948), p. xxviii.
4/ Communism and
/ the Black Man
■"Translator's note: Madame Kesteloot quoted French translations of these folk songs
from Nouvel Age, no. 10 (October 1931), and from a booklet Le negre qui chante, ed.
Eugene Jolas (Toulouse: Editions des Cahiers Libres, 1928). These texts are a close
match with “Negro Songs of Protest,’’ transcribed by Lawrence Gellert, published in the
American left-wing magazine New Masses for November 1930 (pp. 10-11), January 1931
(pp. 16-17), and April 1931 (p. 6), which appear to have been the original sources.
46
Communism and the Black Man / 47
translator’s note: Lawrence Gellert, “Negro Songs of Protest,” New Masses, Novem¬
ber 1930, p. 11.
48/THE BEGINNINGS
history would continue into the 1940s. For further information see The Columbia Ency¬
clopedia. ]
translator’s note: This rather overstates the truth. In the Scottsboro case, for exam¬
ple, the “ultimate freeing of most of the defendants was . . . the result of unceasing labor
by the Scottsboro Defense Committee, formed in December 1935, which for the most
part represented liberal non-Communist organizations” (Columbia Encyclopedia). Com¬
munist use of the case for propaganda purposes greatly complicated these efforts.
2. Legitime Defense, “Avertissement,” p. 1.
3. Etienne Lero, “Misere d’une poesie,” in Legitime Defense, p. 12.
50/THE BEGINNINGS
The open sympathy for the Soviet Union shown by American Negro
poets like Langston Hughes or an Afro-Cuban poet like Nicolas Guil¬
len, was to have a similar effect.
Aside from these external reasons for joining the Communist Party
—the prestige of the Third Internationale, the party’s interest in
Negroes, and the example of their predecessors of the same race the
Martiniquan students had more personal reasons for rising “against all
those who are not suffocated by this Christian, capitalist, bourgeois
world.”4 The first two articles of Legitime Defense's manifesto were en¬
tirely devoted to denouncing the intolerable social conditions of the
“earthly paradise which Martinique was supposed to be. To those
who have dreamed of the Islands with a poet s heart, they explained
that a held worker’s earnings were barely enough to cover the cost of
food. “The disproportion between the work performed and the few
francs earned is such that the word ‘wages’ is inappropriate. For the
skeptical let me add that a worker earns between seven and twelve
francs for a day’s work that often consists of thirteen hours,” reports
Maurice-Sabat Quitman.5 Field laborers comprise 80 percent of the
population; their clothes are generally patched together from sacking.
If a peasant marries and has children, his life becomes still more
difficult “until his children, on reaching the age of six to eight years,
can join the struggle for their existence. Whether girls or boys, the
children are hired and enrolled as helpers. Each one brings his
household five francs more.”
“Is it surprising then that, according to military records for 1932, 80
percent of the young men of draft age were illiterate? And yet there
was no lack of schools. There were 600 elementary schools, commer¬
cial schools, a school of arts and crafts, professional schools, and a
preparatory school for future lawyers. ... As Monsieur Gerbinis,
Governor of Martinique, has put it: ‘The Colony has at its disposal
every resource for the development of intellectual culture.’ But of
what use are all these schools if the children have to earn their liv¬
ing from the age of eight? Poor people must be given the means to
send their children to these schools in order to improve their condi¬
tion.”
Why were the Martiniquan peasants so destitute? Jules Monnerot
replies: “A hereditary white plutocracy, which no revolution has ever
succeeded in ousting, owns four-fifths of the land and uses the black
working class as human material to transform sugarcane into sugar and
rum. All the important posts in the factories as well as in the trading
companies are held by members of this plutocracy. The white Creoles
who once profited from slavery and still profit from a slavery of wage
earners (the condition of a cane cutter in 1932 is no better than it was
in 1832) form a closed, inexorable society.”6
The white landowner, factory owner, or merchant therefore con¬
trolled all means of production. If the peasant wished to stay alive, he
had to be employed by them, accepting their conditions.
“Three quarters of the Island belongs to five or six families of
manufacturers, whose cupidity is matched only by the patience of the
workers.”7 And, since Martinique was a French colony, “no govern¬
ment, even a leftist one, has ever attempted to limit this feudal power.”
The government today, as yesterday, still guarantees the security of
French colonial “free enterprise,” with the help of the army and the
civil service.8
“Peaceful persuasion was also employed: Along with the constables,
the administrators, and the tools of labor and police power imported
to the colonized countries, came ideas with which the natives were
conditioned in order to permit the happy exploitation of the con¬
quered land. Among the colonist’s ideas Christianity generally ap¬
pears, encouraging resignation and suppressing anything among the
indigenous population which might hinder the smooth conduct of
business.”9
With such protection, declares Rene Menil, the European colonist
can afford to “deposit a million francs in the town bank on the birth
of a daughter” or assure the future education of his sons—sons “who
rarely need perform their military service.”10
Does the power of democracy ever prevent this aristocratic minority
from having its members elected to Parliament? There is no obstacle
here. The aristocracy buys its legislators ready-made. Their repre¬
sentatives are mainly chosen from the colored bourgeoisie, whose
political ideas generally defy analysis. Governors, police, colonial mag-
istrates, marines, etc., take part to a man in the elections, which are
always fraudulent—and occasionally people are killed.
15. Ibid.
16. Etienne Fero, “Misere,” p. 10.
17. Rene Menil, “Generalites,” p. 7.
18. Ibid.
19. Frantz Fanon, Peau noire, masques blancs (Paris: Seuil, 1952). Translated as Black
Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1967).
20. Rene Menil, “Generalites,” p. 7.
54/THE BEGINNINGS
shown in sufficiently fast motion, the bent back of the black slave could
easily turn into the obsequious back of the colored, refined, and kow¬
towing bourgeois who—in the space of a few frames—would be seen
to grow a suit and a bowler hat.”*1 The “successful” end product of
this evolution in the opinion of Legitime Defense is therefore nothing but
a marionette, a despicable puppet. He is not a ridiculous figure but a
tragic one, the man “who dares not be himself, who is afraid,
ashamed,”22 ashamed to the point of applying this racial prejudice to
his brothers and basing his hierarchy of values on the degree of black¬
ness of his skin. This is tragic both for himself and his people, from
whom he separates himself, thus reinforcing their shackles.
The young bourgeois members of Legitime Defense were perfectly
aware of the responsibilities of their class. If the condition of Martini¬
quan workers is so bad, they said, the fault lies with those who,
refusing to admit that these pariahs are their brothers, ought at least
to consider them human beings. The fault lies with those who place
their intelligence at the service of factory owners, who are clever ex¬
ploiters of that false pride which consists of denying one’s origins and
looking down on niggers.’ ”25 The cowardliness of this class prevents
it from seeing that if “black workers go on cutting cane and still do not
think of cutting off the heads of those who continually betray them,”24
“a day will come when these workers will revolt.”25
The protagonists of Legitime Defense openly proposed, moreover, to
bring this thought to mind. “Traitors to their class,” they declared
their intention “to go as far as possible along the path of this treason.
And they urged the sons of the bourgeoisie to follow their example,
at least those among them “who are not yet damned, dead, successful,
settled university students, decorated, spoiled, wealthy, prudish,
decorative, branded opportunists . . ., those who can still claim—with
some semblance of truth—that they are alive.”26 “If we address young
West Indians like this,” they wrote, “it is because we consider that they
especially have suffered from capitalism and that they seem to offer—
insofar as their ethnic personality has been materially determined a
generally higher potential for rebellion and joy.”27
Legitime Defense, in short, only wanted to prepare for revolution. And
certain sentences have the familiar ring of communist propaganda:
“The bourgeois ... no longer wish to share ... the profits sweated
“The wind rising from black America will soon sweep the
West Indies clean, we hope, of all the stunted fruits of its outdated
culture,” cried Etienne Lero at the end of his critical examination of
West Indian literature.1 Following Lero’s stirring declaration of faith
was an excerpt from a rousing chapter of Claude McKay’s novel Banjo,
introduced under a new title, “L’etudiant antillais vu par un noir
americain”2 (“The West Indian student as seen by an American Ne¬
gro”). In the same journal Rene Menil wrote: “The poems of American
Negroes are moving the whole world. 3
Senghor, Cesaire, and Damas, the founders of what came to be
known as the negritude movement,4 acknowledge that, between 1930
and 1940, African and West Indian students living in Paris were in
close contact with the American Negro writers Claude McKay, Jean
Toomer, Langston Hughes, and Countee Cullen, and that they read
these writers’ work and were personally acquainted with them. We
were in contact with these black Americans during the years 1929—34,
through Mademoiselle Paulette Nardal, who, with Dr. Sajous, a Hai¬
tian, had founded the Revue du Monde Noir. Mademoiselle Nardal kept
a literary salon, where African Negroes, West Indians, and American
56
Black Students in Paris and the Harlem Renaissance / 57
5. L. S. Senghor, letter of February 1960. This salon was frequently attended by the
famous colored American professor Alain Locke. The Revue du Monde Noir was published
in two languages (English and French), and Felix Eboue, Jean Price-Mars, and Claude
McKay contributed articles. It has been impossible for us to obtain more information
concerning this review published by Mademoiselle Nardal, or to obtain any copies of it.
Although there were only six issues, we know that it prepared the ground for Legitime
Defense and that it was the cause of proceedings brought against the promoters of Legitime
Defense.
6. Aime Cesaire, “Introduction a la poesie negre americaine,” in Tropiques, no. 2 (July
1941, Fort-de-France, Martinique).
7. Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery: An Autobiography (1901; New York: Dodd,
Mead, 8c Co., 1965), p. 92.
58/THE BEGINNINGS
8. Margaret Just Butcher, The Negro in American Culture, based on materials left by Alain
Locke (New York: Knopf, 1957; rev. ed., 1971), p. 101.
9. Richard Wright, White Man, Listen! (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1957, 1964
[Anchor Books]), p. 85.
10. Margaret J. Butcher, The Negro in American Culture.
1 1. Margaret Mitchell’s novel Gone with the Wind is a more recent example of this
“Southern romanticism.”
Black Students in Paris and the Harlem Renaissance / 59
Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois, whose book The Souls of Black Folk12 became “the
Bible of the militant school of protest.’’13 He was followed by Paul
Laurence Dunbar and Charles W. Chestnut. This was the beginning
of the “Harlem Renaissance,” which flourished between 1914 and
1925.
The black renaissance, moreover, coincided with a general renewal
of American literature immediately after World War I. Breaking away
from the romantic tradition, it turned toward critical realism and be¬
gan to reflect an interest in social problems.14 In Europe the best
known American writers of this new literary orientation are Steinbeck,
Hemingway, Dos Passos, Faulkner, Caldwell, and the black author
Richard Wright.
For black writers, the new realism consisted of a clearer conception
of their situation, exposing the injustice and prejudice that made black
Americans outcasts in their own land, and demanding rehabilitation of
Negro cultural values and their total independence of the white world.
There is no clearer expression of the militant nature of their stand
than Langston Hughes’s proud declaration:
We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual
dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are
glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter. We know that we are beautiful and ugly
too. The tom-tom weeps and the tom-tom laughs. If colored people are
pleased we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn’t matter either.
We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on
top of the mountain, free within ourselves.15
12. The Editions de Presence Africaine, Paris, published this book in 1959, for the
first time in French, as Ames nones. This translation represents the twenty-sixth edition
of Souls of Black Folk, first published in the United States in 1903.
13. Margaret J. Butcher, The Negro, p. 129.
14. Professor A. Baiwir describes this evolution very well in his important work Le
declin de 1'individualisme chez les romanciers amencains contemporains (Brussels: Editions Lu-
miere, n.d.).
15. Quoted by L. S. Senghor in “Trois poetes negro-americains,” in the review Poesie
45 (Paris: P. Seghers, 1945). Statement of Hughes in an article in The Nation, 1926.
English text as quoted in Milton Meltzer’s biography, Langston Hughes (New York:
Thomas Y. Crowell, 1968), pp. 129-30.
60/THE BEGINNINGS
16. Langston Hughes, The Big Sea: An Autobiography, new ed. (New York: Hill and
Wang, 1962), pp. 224, 225, 227, 228.
Black Students in Paris and the Harlem Renaissance/ 61
17. Preface by Georges Friedmann to the French edition of Claude McKay’s Banjo.
18. Claude McKay, Banjo, Harvest ed., p. 319.
19. Ibid., p. 193.
20. Ibid., p. 207.
21. Ibid., p. 194.
62/THE BEGINNINGS
Claude McKay also referred to this reaction in Banjo. The way Amer¬
ica treated blacks was disgusting, he wrote, but the French too, even
if they did it more politely, concealed “a fundamental contempt for
black people quite as pronounced as in the Anglo-Saxon lands. . . .
There was if anything an unveiled condescension in it that was gall to
a Negro who wanted to live his life free of the demoralizing effects of
being pitied and patronized. Here like anywhere . . . one black villain
made all black villains as one black tart made all black tarts.”24
At the African bar the conversation turned on the hostile feeling that existed
between the French West Indians and the native Africans. The patron said that
the West Indians felt superior because many of them were appointed as petty
officials in the African colonies and were often harder on the natives than the
whites.
Fils d’esclaves! Fils d’esclaves! cried a Senegalese sergeant. Because thay
have a chance to be better instructed than we, they think we are the savages
and that they are “white” negroes. Why, they are only the descendants of the
slaves that our forefathers sold.26
Dine with some of the men and women who got rich off of your labor,
who clip coupons with clean white fingers because your hands dug
coal, drilled stone, sewed garments, poured steel to let other peo¬
ple draw dividends and live easy.
(Or haven’t you had enough yet of the soup-lines and the bitter bread
of charity?)
Hallelujah! Undercover driveways!
Ma soul's a witness for de Waldorf-Astoria!
(A thousand nigger section-hands keep the roadbeds smooth so in¬
vestments in railroads pay ladies with diamond necklaces staring at
Cert murals.)
Thank Gawd A 'mighty!
(And a million niggers bend their backs on rubber plantations, for
rich behinds to ride on thick tires to the Theatre Guild tonight.)
Ma soul's a witness!
(And here we stand, shivering in the cold, in Harlem.)
Glory be to Gawd—
De Waldorf-Astoria's open!29
Even today, one discovers that most of the black writers who were
in their twenties at the beginning of the New Deal were for a short
period members of the Communist Party and are still more or less
Marxist.
In poems where the black man’s sufferings and miserable condition
are freely expressed, threats begin to sound. Veiled at first, in Countee
Cullen’s poem:
We shall not always plant while others reap
The golden increment of bursting fruit
Tomorrow,
I’ll be at the table
When company comes
Nobody’ll dare
Say to me
“Eat in the kitchen,”
Then.
Besides,
32. “From the dark tower,” quoted by Margaret J. Butcher, in The Negro, p. 104.
33. “Tired,” quoted in Hughes and Bontemps, The Poetry of the Negro (Garden City,
N.Y.: Doubleday, 1949), p. 62.
34. “The white house,” quoted by Richard Wright in White Man, Listen!, p. 96; Hughes
and Bontemps, p. 31.
35. “If we must die,” quoted by Richard Wright in White Man, Listen!; Hughes and
Bontemps, p. 31.
66/THE BEGINNINGS
I, too, am America.36
Abandoning the role of victim for that of judge, Claude McKay
criticized the values of which the West was so proud and in the name
of which it presumed the right to colonize other peoples: Christianity,
technology, and “reason.”
He had no difficulty criticizing the latter. The First World War
abundantly proved the impotence of “reason, which had proved un¬
able to prevent either barbarous conflicts or the civil wars of rea¬
sonable” nations:
[Ray] was not unaware that his position as a black boy looking on the civi¬
lized scene was a unique one. He was having a good grinning time of it.
Italians against French, French against Anglo-Saxons, English against Ger¬
mans, the great Daily Mail shrieking like a mad virago that there were still
Germans left who were able to swill champagne in Italy when deserving En¬
glish gentlemen could not afford to replenish their cellars. Oh it was a great
civilization indeed, too entertaining for any savage ever to have the feeling
of boredom.37
His attack on Christianity grew more virulent because this religion
seemed to him a huge swindle. While in Western countries the Church
tolerates materialism and the profit motive, racial pride, and social
diseases like organized prostitution, it claimed the right to “civilize”
colored people and purge them of their “heathen morals.” In reality,
religion was an alibi and a screen for the white subjection of blacks.
McKay therefore rejected Christianity entirely and without exception:
As far as I have been able to think it out the colored races are the special
victims of biblical morality—Christian morality. . . .
I don’t think I loathe anything more than the morality of the Christians. It
is false, treacherous, hypocritical. I know that, for I myself have been a victim
of it in your white world, and the conclusion I draw from it is that the world
needs to get rid of false moralities and cultivate decent manners—not society
manners, but man-to-man decency and tolerance.
So—if I were to follow any of the civilized peoples, it wouldn’t be the Jews
or the Christians or the Indians. I would rather go to the Chinese—to Confu¬
cius.38
This cry from the heart is an echo of the speech made in 1852 by
Frederick Douglass, a pioneer Negro abolitionist, who explained the
aversion of blacks to Christian morality:
36. “I, too, sing America,” quoted in Hughes and Bontemps, p. 64.
37. Claude McKay, Banjo, p. 136.
38. Ibid., p. 268.
Black Students in Paris and the Harlem Renaissance / 67
You boast of your love of liberty, your superior civilization, and your pure
Christianity, while twin political powers of the nation (as embodied in the two
political parties) is solemnly pledged to perpetuate the enslavement of three
million of your countrymen. You hurl your anathemas at the crown-headed
tyrants of Russia and Austria and pride yourselves on your democratic institu¬
tions, while you yourselves consent to be the mere tools and bodyguards of
the tyrants of Virginia and Carolina. You invite to your shores fugitives of
oppression from abroad, honor them with banquets, greet them with ovations,
cheer them, toast them, salute them, protect them, and pour out your money
to them like water; but the fugitives from your own land you advertise, hunt,
arrest, shoot, and kill. You glory in your refinement and education, yet you
maintain a system as barbarous and dreadful as ever stained the character of
a nation—a system begun in avarice, supported in pride, and perpetuated in
cruelty. You shed tears over fallen Hungary, and make the sad story of her
wrongs the theme of your poets, statesmen, and orators, till your gallant sons
are ready to fly to arms to vindicate her cause against the oppressor; but in
regard to the ten thousand wrongs of the American slave, you would enforce
the strictest silence, and would hail him as an enemy of the nation who dares
to make these wrongs the subject of public discourse!39
We have made a point of quoting large excerpts from this speech,
although it is now more than a hundred years old, because it is contem¬
porary still in many respects. It underlines perfectly the glaring contra¬
dictions between beliefs and acts for which colored people censure
whites with such constancy as to give truth to the accusation. The
travesty of Christian morality, when it occurs in relations between
peoples, inevitably casts discredit on an ideology which is nonetheless
basically humanist and whose principles call for attitudes completely
contrary to those actually adopted.
As to the technical progress so warmly extolled by Western coun¬
tries as one of their most important attributes, McKay saw in tech¬
nology the deterioration of human possibilities, a yoke on spontaneity,
a diminishment of man, and a depersonalization particularly painful to
blacks. We should remember that McKay’s book was written at a time
when assembly-line work was being denounced on film by Charlie
Chaplin (in Modern Times) and by Rene Clair ( in A nous la liberte). In
America as in Europe, men—Mounier, Duhamel, Bernanos—were
sounding an alarm. The fears raised by increasing automation con¬
cerned not only the “mechanical organization of life” but also the
leveling of personalities, the “standardization” of man and the boring
everyday life that would be the result. Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt ex¬
pressed a similar anxiety, which was shared by all clear-thinking Ameri¬
cans. The opinion of black writers about most white American writers
[Ray] kept wondering how [his] race would fare under the ever tightening
mechanical organization of modern life. . . . The grand mechanical march of
civilization had levelled the world down to the point where it seemed treason¬
able for an advanced thinker to doubt that what was good for one nation or
people was also good for another. But as he was never afraid of testing ideas,
so he was not afraid of doubting. All peoples must struggle to live, but just
as what was helpful for one man might be injurious to another, so it might be
with whole communities of peoples.
For Ray happiness was the highest good, and difference the greatest alarm,
of life. The hand of progress was robbing his people of many primitive and
beautiful qualities. He could not see where they would find greater happiness
under the weight of the machine. . . .
Many apologists of a changed and magnificent machine system doubted
whether the Negro could find a decent place in it. . . . [Ray] did not think the
blacks would come very happily under the super-mechanical Anglo-Saxon-
controlled world society of Mr. H. G. Wells.41
It does not matter to me whether every poem in the book is true to life. Why
should it be paraded before the American public by a Negro author as being
typical or representative of the Negro? Bad enough to have white authors
holding up our imperfections to public gaze. Our aim ought to be present to
the general public, already misinformed by well-meaning and malicious writ¬
ers, our higher aims and aspirations, and our better selves.
Hughes comments:
I felt that the masses of our people had as much in their lives to put into books
as did those more fortunate ones who had been born with some means and
the ability to work up to a master’s degree at a Northern college.45
Claude McKay studied this “alienated” reaction of black intellectu¬
als and discovered several reasons for it. First of all, the loss of a folk
tradition and folk wisdom, which are the foundations of any culture.
Afro-Americans are uprooted people, twice uprooted if they are cul¬
tured men, educated and policed by Western civilization. Also, there
is the deep inferiority complex from which all American Negroes
suffer, the more so this elite for whom whites represent an ideal,
leading them to stifle in themselves anything that might appear strange
to a civilized white. This black elite so faithfully attempts to imitate the
white American as to completely obliterate its own personality. McKay
accused this Negro bourgeoisie of no longer being “a people believing
in themselves.”46 They seemed to have lost their native spontaneity,
the invigorating contact with the masses, in the attempt to obtain a
“civilization” of doubtful value.
To rediscover the least distorted black values, one had to go to the
masses, the laborers, the sailors, a whole working class for whom life
was difficult, but which still had “that raw unconscious and the devil-
with-them pride in being Negro,” who represented “the irrepressible
exuberance and legendary vitality of the black race” whose appar-
been cut off from all contact with their continent of origin for more
than three centuries.49
But it was through personal contact with black Africans that McKay
realized both what he had missed and an enrichment in the recognition
of his origins.
[Ray] always felt humble when he heard the Senegalese and other West African
tribes speaking their own languages with native warmth and feeling.
The Africans gave him a positive feeling of wholesome contact with racial
roots. They made him feel that he was not merely an unfortunate accident of
birth, but that he belonged definitely to a race weighed, tested, and poised in
the universal scheme. They inspired him with confidence in them. Short of
extermination by the Europeans, they were a safe people, protected by their
own indigenous culture. Even though they stood bewildered before the impos¬
ing bigness of white things, apparently unaware of the invaluable worth of
their own, they were naturally defended by the richness of their fundamental
racial values.50
The acknowledgment of Africa was one of the pervasive characteris¬
tics of the Harlem Renaissance. Countee Cullen’s most beautiful poem
perhaps, “Heritage,” is a long evocation of African landscapes, full of
the persistent, rhythmic resonance of tom-toms, and of his fascination
with ancient gods:
Banjo was the first novel to articulate the Negro problem fully and
clearly. Blacks in Paris could not remain indifferent to so many revolu¬
tionary ideas. But they were also attracted by Banjo's free and easy
style, by its human warmth, the reality of its characters. Senghor,
Cesaire, and Damas can still cite entire chapters. “What struck me in
this book,” said Aime Cesaire,“is that for the first time Negroes were
described truthfully, without inhibitions or prejudice.”54
Banjo's success did not stop with the first “triumvirate” of black
writers. Ousmane Soce pointed out during the same period in Mirages
de Pans55 that Banjo was displayed in black-student bookshelves right
next to books by Delafosse.56 In La rue Cases Negres, Joseph Zobel
51. Langston Hughes, “Poem,” from The Weary Blues (New York: Knopf, 1926); a
French translation appeared in the review Nouvel Age in 1931.
52. Hughes, “Our Land,” in The Weary Blues and also in Nouvel Age.
53. Quoted by Margaret J. Butcher, The Negro, p. 97.
54. Interview with A. Cesaire, September 1959.
55. Ousmane Soce, Mirages de Pans, novel, followed by Rythmes du khalam, poems
(Paris: Nouvelles Editions Latines, 1955).
56. See chap. 7 below.
Black Students in Paris and the Harlem Renaissance / 73
From this poetry, which might seem like the sort Valery called “loose,” “de¬
fenseless,” written only to the rhythm of a juvenile spontaneity, at the exact
point of intersection between the ego and the world, a drop of blood oozes.
A drop. But of blood. . . .
There is its value: to be open on man in his wholeness. What others bring
57. Joseph Zobel, La rue Cases Negres (Paris: Editions Jean Froissart, 1950).
58. Sembene Ousmane, Le docker noir (Paris: Editions Debresse, 1956).
59. L. S. Senghor, “Trois poetes negro-americains,” in Poesie 45.
74 /THE BEGINNINGS
to poetry is a preference for the exterior world or for man at his most noble,
the finest flower of his thought or feelings. And what indicates that greater or
lesser mobility is the fear of oneself, a capitulation of the being to the seeming
to be, a refusal to accept one’s complete nature. But such weakness is unknown
to the Negro poet. His treasure lies in those depths disdained by others. . . .
Where the role of an earlier literature was to seek out the grotesque, the
absurd or exotic aspects of the ordinary Negro, this Negro now becomes the
poet’s hero. He is described seriously, with passion, and the limited power of
his art—by a miracle of love—succeeds, where more considerable means fail,
in suggesting even those inner forces which command destiny. Is creating a
world of minor importance? Evoking a world from the outlandish inhuman
creatures that used to be displayed row after row as if in a ten-cent store? And
where once we could find nothing but a vision of crude puppets, to reap new
ways of suffering, dying, enduring, in a word, to carry the sure weight of human
existence.60
More than aesthetic criteria, it was the human values of sincerity,
love, and humility that touched Cesaire. He was so deeply affected that
without hesitation he proposed this type of poetry as a model for all
Negro poets.
Senghor too has emphasized this aspect which he considers of prin¬
cipal importance:
[It is a] human poetry, and for this reason it deserves to be known. America
is not only a land of machines and records, it is also a land of youth and hope,
and among all its faces, America’s black face is one of its most human.61
1. Rene Maran, Batouala—vbitable roman negre (Paris: Albin Michel, 1921, 1938 [edition
definitive]). An English translation by Barbara Beck and Alexandre Mboukou, Batouala:
A True Black Novel, was published in Washington, D.C., by Black Orpheus Press in 1972.
2. La Depeche Colomale, 26 December 1921 issue.
3. Interview with Rene Maran, March 1959.
75
76/THE BEGINNINGS
What promises they made us! “You will realize later,” they said,“that it was
with your happiness in mind that we forced you to work. We only take a small
part of the money we compel you to earn. We shall use this small part to
construct villages, roads, and bridges for you, and machines which, with the
help of fire, move along on steel bars! . . .
Thirty moons ago, they were still buying our rubber at three francs a kilo.
Without any explanation, from one day to the next, the same quantity of
“banga” brought only fifteen sous—one meya and five bi’mbas! And the
governor chose just that moment to raise our taxes from five to seven and ten
francs! . . .
4. Joseph Zobel, La rue Cases Negres (Paris: Editions Jean Froissart, 1950).
5. Ousmane Soce, Mirages de Pans (Paris: Nouvelles Editions Latines, 1955).
6. A former French Equatorial African territory to the north of the former Belgian
Congo.
7. Interview with Rene Maran, March 1959.
8. H. Baumann and D. Westermann, Lespeuples et les civilisations de I'Afnque (Paris: Payot,
1948, 1957), pp. 294ff.
Rene Maran and Batouala / 77
We are nothing but bodies to be taxed. We are nothing but beasts of burden.
Beasts? Not even. A dog? They feed dogs and take good care of their horses.
Us? We are less than these animals, we are lower than the lowest. They are
slowly killing us.9
There were insults and injuries. Batouala was entirely right. Before the arrival
of the whites we were happy. We worked little and for ourselves alone. We ate,
drank and slept. Occasionally, we had bloody palavers, where we tore out the
livers of the dead, to eat their courage and make it ours. Those were the happy
days before the whites came. . . .
Now they were nothing but slaves. There was nothing to hope for from a
race with no hearts. For these boundjous were heartless. They abandon the
children they have with black women. These children, knowing they are the
sons of whites, do not deign to consort with negroes. Full of hate and envy,
like the boundjouvoukos they are, these “black-and-whites” lead vicious, lazy,
evil lives and are hated by one and all.10
Further on, Rene Maran explains the Banda philosophy of the after¬
life.11
This area was well populated and very rich in rubber, covered with plantations
of every kind. It swarmed with goats and chickens. Seven years were enough
to bring about its ruin. Villages were dispersed, plantations disappeared, goats
and chickens were destroyed. As for the natives, debilitated from constant,
excessive, and unpaid work, it became impossible for them to spend the
necessary time to sow their own crops. Sickness and famine struck, and their
numbers decreased.15
Undoubtedly, the Ubangi-Shari region was particularly ill organized
and poorly managed, for the author emphasizes the negligence, im¬
morality, and cynicism of his colleagues.
It is they who are responsible for the harm done in certain parts of the black
man’s country, wrongs from which the people still suffer today. For the sake
of their promotions, administrators must have no trouble. They did not have
the courage to speak out. And with moral weakness added to their intellectual
anemia, they have betrayed their homeland without the slightest remorse.16
Maran therefore called upon his “brothers in spirit, the writers of
France”17 to echo his testimony and urge that serious measures be
taken. “I call on you to redress what the administration euphemisti¬
cally calls ‘weaknesses.’ The battle will be difficult. You will encounter
slave traders. It will be harder to fight them than to do battle with
windmills. The task is a noble one! To work then, without delay! You
owe it to France!”18
It showed considerable optimism to imagine naively that the testi¬
mony of one honest man would overturn the established disorder.
Particularly when that one man happened to be black. He was made
to pay dearly for his audacity. Leon Damas has explained how a press
campaign was launched against Rene Maran that was to have cruel
repercussions on his career. The day after the Goncourt vote, Paul
Souday, all honey and venom, wrote in Le Temps that Maran’s indict¬
ment of colonial administrators was so formidable that every French¬
man, and every European too, would blush for shame. In an ordinary
book Souday thought this might pass unnoticed. The stir created by
the Prix Goncourt and the thousand of purchasers it would attract both
in France and abroad, however, made silence difficult. So the reviewer
declared that the decision of the ten Goncourt members would pro¬
voke “questions in the Chamber of Deputies, an investigation and
severe censure either of the administration or of. . . the author of the
indictment.”19 An investigation commission did arrive in French
83
84/NEGRITUDE IS BORN
ana, Africa, Madagascar, and became merely a black student. Life in isola¬
tion was over.2
“ L 'Etudiant Noir and Legitime Defense,” writes Senghor,3 represented
respectively two tendencies shared by the students. Although both
reviews had been subject to the same influences, they differed on
several points: L'Etudiant Noir believed in the priority of culture. For
us,” he adds, “politics was but one aspect of culture, whereas Legitime
Defense maintained . . . that political revolution should precede cultural
revolution, the latter becoming possible only if radical political change
had occurred. But what political revolution? Monnerot and his friends
saw salvation only in communism and consequently in the fight against
colonialism. I note, however, that these curious revolutionaries did not
preach the independence of Africa, and still less of the West Indies.
They were content to repeat communist slogans.”
It is true that the aspect of communism which had struck Etienne
Lero and his friends most was the class struggle. As we have already
pointed out, they had not yet questioned French domination of the
West Indies.4 Even today, the communists of Martinique are still com¬
pletely subservient to French representatives of the party.5 We should
add, however, that an awareness of colonization was just beginning in
1932. Legitime Defense had proposed a first set of solutions to several
important problems. It was normal for its successors to attempt to go
further. “Monnerot and his friends rejected traditional Western values
in the name of contemporary Western values, in the name of commu¬
nism and surrealism . . . whereas our first move was to reject all
Western values.”6
It might be more accurate to say that the Etudiant Noir group used
contemporary Western values with discrimination, choosing from
them only what was likely to promote the dignity of black peoples. For
this reason L'Etudiant Noir refused to belong to any party, even an
international one, or to establish Marxism as an ideology, preferring
to distrust—as Marx himself had wanted in Das Kapital—-the “tendency
2. None of the writers I could reach was able to supply me with a copy of this
newspaper. Therefore I was only able to read a few excerpts from L. Damas, Notre
Generation” (unpublished manuscript).
3. L. S. Senghor, letter of February 1960.
4. See chap. 4, p. 55, above.
5. This is one of the reasons Cesaire left the party in 1956. In his Lettre a Maurice Thorez
(Paris: Presence Africaine, 1956), p. 13, he wrote: ‘‘The French Communist Party thinks
of its duties to colonial peoples in terms of authoritative power to be exercised and
. . . French communist anticolonialism still bears the stigma of the colonialism against
which it is fighting.”
6. L. S. Senghor, letter of February 1960.
L ’Etudiant Noir: A Forum for the New Ideas / 85
can capture nature’s secrets and more or less compel them to take
tangible form. This is the main function of fetishes, masks, statues of
ancestors, etc.—objects both artistic and religious at the same time, the
two domains are always inseparable here.30
Senghor tells us that “any language which is not imaginative is
boring because it does not reach the feelings. What is more, the Afri¬
can Negro does not understand such a language.’’31
This, of course, refers to artistic language. In ordinary conversation
an African uses the exact word applicable to concrete objects, and
when he says “This tree is ten meters high,” he means exactly the same
thing we do. But the artist’s language must always be understood as
a fable. Beings and things are not accepted as themselves but as ideas
evoked by them, just as in La Fontaine, for whom the oak tree repre¬
sents proud strength and the reed humility and apparent frailty. Ex¬
cept for fables, whose double meaning is made clear to Westerners
from their childhood, the Westerner has lost this spontaneous under¬
standing of symbols. The greatness of modern poets is to have redis¬
covered this “world of correspondences” Baudelaire spoke of. It is
also their tragedy, since they are incomprehensible to the general
public and only accessible to an elite. “The French,” Senghor ob¬
serves, “always feel the need to comment and explain the meaning of
images by abstract words. For the Negro poet this is rarely necessary.
His public has this second sight spontaneously,32 because it is initiated,
. . . gifted with inner eyes which see through walls. . . .33 There is no
need,” he adds, “to explain that the young girl who has just seen her
fiance triumph in athletic games is flooded with joy as she sings:
30. Let us take an easily understood example: a wedding ring. The ring represents
the bond uniting the husband and wife, and the gold represents their indestructible
fidelity. For us these are but symbols, ineffectual ideas, whereas an African—supposing
this particular symbolism is also valid for him, which we do not know—would use this
shape and this metal in order to “trap’’ the invisible forces which ensure faithfulness in
marriage. A man wearing such a ring would thus inform other men, not only that he was
married, and intended to remain faithful to his wife, but that the power magically
contained in the ring would really give him the virtue of fidelity.
31. L. S. Senghor, “L’art negro-africain,” p. 11.
32. L. S. Senghor, “Langage et poesie negro-africaine,” p. 8.
33. Ibid., p. 7.
34. Ibid., pp. 7-8.
L'Etudiant Non: A Forum for the New Ideas / 89
Senghor also seems to say that the African artist accepts these exter¬
nal forces, that he submits to them without difficulty, and that his role
merely consists of revealing them. (This is what we shall call a religious
mentality.) But in Africa one also finds a magic mentality. By means of
rites and certain practices, men try to control and tame vital forces for
personal or community ends.
In European surrealism, we discover numerous traces of a similar
belief in the power of magic. Words, pictures, objects, briefly, all
means of expression, can serve not only to reveal the forces of the
unconscious, but also to use these forces to transform the world or
oneself (the alchemy of the word). Consequently, instead of differen¬
tiating between Negro African surrealism and European surrealism
under the pretext that only the former accepts the existence of a
metaphysical universe, would it not be more interesting to distinguish
between the religious current and the magic current (in the sense we
understood these adjectives above), both contained in a single surreal¬
ism? Nothing, moreover, prevents both tendencies from existing side
by side in an artist’s work.
Among Negro Africans, Senghor and Birago Diop are perfect exam¬
ples of the religious mentality, whereas the incantations of a Damas and
the rebellion of a Cesaire belong rather to the magic current.38 This
magical attempt to “change life’’ is found in Western literature also,
particularly since Rimbaud, Lautreamont, and the German romantics.
And it is not by mere chance that many poets have been interested in the
occult and esoteric sciences.39
In sum, Negro African surrealism is probably more complicated
than Senghor imagined, and fundamentally, perhaps, it does not differ
greatly from European surrealism. Yet, the expression of Negro Afri¬
can poets remains entirely different from that of French surrealists.
The founders of L'Etudiant Noir always rejected the indiscriminate
imitation of acknowledged masters, as Etienne Lero and his group had
done before them, but were concerned above all about being authen¬
tic.
In discussing communism from a social point of view, and surrealism
from a literary one, then, L'Etudiant Noir was moving away from even
the most revolutionary Western values, in an attempt to rediscover
“the values of negritude.” It was in this sense that L'Etudiant Noir
preached cultural revolution before anything else: “How can we wish
38. Perhaps the magic and demiurgic aspect is given greater emphasis by West Indian
poets because of the more stifling social conditions and of less deeply rooted religious
beliefs. See also chap. 18, note 29, below.
39. P. Mabille, Le miroir du merveilleux (Paris: Editions du Sagittaire, 1940).
L'Etudiant Non: A Forum for the New Ideas / 91
42. A. Viatte, in Histone litterane de I’Amenque frangaise, des ongines a 1950 (Paris: PUF,
1954), p. 510, declares that between 1940 and 1945 “Guy Tirolien was a fellow prisoner,
during the war, of L. S. Senghor, theorist of ‘negritude.’ By this means, West Indian
literature was welded to that of black Africa.’’ In reality the “welding” took place
approximately ten years earlier.
43. Cesaire claims that Senghor revealed Africa to him.
44. Interview with L. Damas, June 1959.
8 How the Ethnologists Helped
93
94/NEGRITUDE IS BORN
10. See especially the space given to Frobenius by Cesaire in his Martiniquan review
Tropiques—a study included in part III, below—and the allusion he again makes to him,
in 1955, in the Discours sur le colomahsme (Paris: Presence Africaine), p. 36. [Translator’s
note: See also “Negritude and the Germans,” by Leopold Sedar Senghor, in Africa
Report, May 1967.]
11. L. S. Senghor, ‘‘Ce que l’homme noir apporte,” in L 'homme de couleur (Paris: Plon,
1939).
12. Maurice Delafosse; Les noirs de VAfnque (Paris: Payot, 1922), p. 61.
13. Ibid., pp. 60-61. See also G. Dieterlen, ‘‘Importance du Mali pour la diffusion des
mythes cosmogoniques,” Journal des Afncamstes 25 (1955) and 29 (1959).
96/NEGRITUDE IS BORN
the Askia Mohammed,22 . . . scholars and educated men who, without the aid
of dictionaries or any vehicular language, have grasped Arabic sufficiently well
to read it fluently and write it correctly, to form idioms, the flexibility, richness,
and preciseness of which astonish all those who study them, idioms which
could—by the normal play of their morphological laws and without foreign
interpolation—furnish the required instrument to those speaking these idi¬
oms; if these peoples could leap fifteen or twenty centuries forward, to invent
a perfectly viable system of writing—in the same way that the Vai people of
the Coast a hundred years ago and, more recently, the Cameroon Bamouns
invented seeds—then these peoples do not deserve to be treated as intellectual
inferiors.23
One can see the use the black students would make of such affirma¬
tions. They knew now they had a history. Oral tradition had already
told them the great deeds of their tribes, but here was a white scholar,
after broad and thorough study, advising them that these local histo¬
ries were integral parts of a history of vast empires, whose fame had
already reached as far as Arabia, Morocco, and even Spain.
Georges Hardy’s work L'art negre, published in 1927, must also be
mentioned, since it disproved certain preconceived ideas that had
been believed for centuries about African religions:24
For most of our contemporaries, the religion of black Africans has to do with
the adoration of fetishes, idols, images, embodying good or evil natural forces.
... It is understood that this fetishist, idolatrous, polytheistic religion is also
imbued with totemism. These are all errors, preconceived notions to be dis¬
carded if one wishes to reach the deeply religious Negro soul. The religion of
black Africans has little in common with so crude a picture or so simplistic an
analogy. Doubtless it is full of fetishist and superstitious practices; but... these
must not be confused with the religion itself, any more than Catholicism
should be confused with survivals of magic that still exist in rural Europe.
. . . 7 he better one knows these religions, the more one can assert that they
originate from a common dogma, a dogma of considerable strength and depth
to have resisted so many trials and to have maintained itself so firmly despite
a general absence of sacred books.25
As the title of his study indicates, Georges Hardy particularly
stresses the blacks’ artistic talents, both in the literary and musical
domains, as well as in sculpture, the field in which they excell. Many
times he hints that “European influence here—no matter who the
representative may be—appears to be disastrous for Africa.”26 He
22. Chief of the Gao empire, who reigned from 1493 to 1529, at the peak of Gao’s
glory.
23. Maurice Delafosse, Les noirs de I’Afnque, p. 159.
24. G. Hardy, L’art negre (Paris: Henri Laurens, 1927).
25. Ibid., pp. 14, 16.
26. Ibid., p. 99.
98/NEGRITUDE IS BORN
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid., p. 154.
29. Ibid., p. 160.
30. Ousmane Soce, Kanm, roman senegalais (Paris: Editions Fernand Sorlot, 1935; repr.
Paris: Nouvelles Editions Latines, 1948).
31. Wolof—a Senegalese tribe.
32. Preface to Kanm, p. 12.
How the Ethnologists Helped / 99
33. Theodore Monod spent all his professional life in Africa. He became director of
the Institut Frangais d’Afrique Noire (since Senegalese independence, known as the
Institut Fondamental d’Afrique Noire) at Dakar and has always used his knowledge and
fame to help African cultural renaissance.
34. Most of the texts quoted by Delavignette were quoted anew by T. Monod in the
preface of the French translation of a prewar book written by H. Baumann and D.
Westermann, Les peuples et les civilisations de iAfnque (Paris: Payot, 1948, 1957). This
ethnological work is considered the most important synthesis and is also the most
criticized to date, together with G. P. Murdock’s book Africa: Its People and Their Cultural
History (New York: McGraw, 1959).
35. Preface to Kanm.
36. See Melville Herskovits, Man and His Works: The Science of Cultural Anthropology (New
York: Knopf, 1948).
100/ NEGRITUDE IS BORN
culture should retain of its own patrimony only that which is worth keeping,
and should accept no influence from outside except that which is organically
assimilable or can enrich its soul.37
Somewhat ahead of his time, Monod adds:
When all that is outdated after hve centuries of the old colonial system
disappears, in a milieu where new structural and mental forms emerge, it will
be important to accept honestly the enormous—and in my opinion happy
differences which separate men; differences it would be foolish and vain to
deny, but which must be openly recognized in order to And among them the
very foundations of new spiritual progress. On the condition that it be pro¬
gress we are aiming for and that we not continue to consider other systems,
material, economic, political, as an end in themselves rather than what they
are: a means.38
Delavignette concludes by acknowledging the merit of African writ¬
ers, who will help to solve future problems:
By expressing and analyzing themselves, Africans are not only working for
their own development, but also for ours. And they carry the problem of our
relations with Africa to a higher level, obliging them, and us as well, to go
beyond the ancient ideas of colonization to a period of African nationalism.39
The past must not be an obstacle to the adjustment imposed by the present.
It is from a knowledge of the past, out of respect and love for it, that men have
always received a sense of their individual and collective vocations and the
strength to fulfill them. Africa will prove no exception. It will find within itself
sufficient spiritual resources to accomplish the effort of synthesis which the
modern world requires of all men.40
The merit of most French ethnologists, it is clear, was to use all their
scientific authority to support black intellectuals. By 1938, Levy-Bruhl
acknowledged in his notebooks that he felt obliged to go back on his
former assertions and declare that there were no qualitative differ¬
ences between the so-called primitive mentality and that of more de¬
veloped peoples.41 After Delavignette and Theodore Monod, the
blacks were able to count successfully on Professor Paul Rivet, Michel
Leiris, Marcel Griaule, Georges Balandier, and others for support.42
Describing this movement, Cesaire says it was so general that there
was talk of “the great betrayal of Western ethnography which, for
some time, with a deplorable deterioration of its sense of responsibil-
ity, was doing its utmost to cast doubts on the omnilateral superiority
of Western civilization over the exotic civilizations.”43 The colonialists
who denounced this phenomenon had fully recognized its impact.
Roger Caillois, for example, attacked European intellectuals who “in
bitterness and disappointment” persist “in repudiating the various
ideals of their culture, thus encouraging tenacious discomfort, particu¬
larly in Europe.”44 Ignoring the work of the experts, Caillois reasserts
“that only the West is capable of thought. ... At the limits of the
Western world begins the dark kingdom of primitive thought, which,
dominated by the idea of participation, incapable of logic, is the proto¬
type of unsound thinking.”45
With less hypocrisy, the Belgian periodical Europe-Afnque accused
Messieurs Leiris, Levy-Strauss, and Mircea Eliade of shaking the foun¬
dations of the colonial edifice. “Formerly, the colonizer conceived his
relation to the colonized people as basically that between a civilized
man and a savage. Colonization thus rested on a hierarchy, crude no
doubt, but vigorous and secure.”46 On what could this hierarchy be
based from now on, when men of science—the only ones to study
African cultures without prejudice and wholly disinterestedly—were
destroying the idea of “savage,” so convenient to the good conscience
of the colonizer?
43. Aime Cesaire, Discours sur le colomahsme (Paris: Presence Africaine, 1955), p. 57.
44. Ibid., p. 59, quoting Roger Caillois, “Illusion a rebours,” Nouvelle Revue Francaise,
no. 6 (December-January 1955).
45. Ibid., p. 58.
46. Ibid., quoting M. Piron’s article in Europe-Afnque, no. 6 (January 1955).
Negritude: Some Definitions,
Sartre's Negativity
1. Damas does not use the word negritude in any of his writings of that period.
2. Interview with L. S. Senghor, June 1959.
102
Negritude: Some Definitions, Sartre’s Negativity / 103
What makes the negritude of a poem is less the theme than the style, an
emotional warmth which brings words to life and transmutes speech into
verb.7
In other texts Senghor comes back to “negritude of the sources,
precolonial conditions in which the black man lived without alienation;
or to what he also calls the “kingdom of childhood,” a time when he
lived happily in his distant village far from contact with the whites. He
evokes the African night:
Night, delivering me from reasons, salons, sophisms, pirouettes, pretexts,
from calculated hatreds, from slaughter humanized.
Night, melting all my contradictions, melting all contradictions in the primal
unity of your negritude.8
In the first text negritude merely indicates the color of the black
man’s skin; in the second, negritude encompasses the entire race:
My grandfather is dying, I say, hurrah! the old negritude is gradually dying.
. . . It’s true, he was a good Negro, ... a good Negro to his good master
. . . and it never occurred to him that he could hoe, dig, cut anything, anything
other than dull uninteresting cane. . . . And stones, scrap iron, broken bottles
were thrown at him, but neither the stones, the iron, nor the bottles . . .13
These quotations are all taken from the Cahierd’un retour aupays natal
(“Notes on a return to the native land”) written by Cesaire in 1938-39,
in which he experiences four aspects of negritude at the same time:
color, race, psychology, and assertion of rights. Today, Cesaire defines
the term as follows:
the awareness of being black, the simple acknowledgement of a fact which
implies the acceptance of it, a taking charge of one’s destiny as a black man,
of one’s history and culture.15
cultural climate in which African blacks have bathed for many centu¬
ries. It is this “climate” that Senghor calls the “spirit” of African
civilization or the “ensemble of the black world’s values.”
Just as whites are indelibly marked in their way of thinking, feeling,
or expressing themselves by Western European civilization, whose key
values are Reason (for the mind), Technique (for work), Christianity
(for religion), Nature (for art), and Individualism (in the social life),
black peoples are formed by their culture, of which we already know
the principal traits: Solidarity, born of the cohesion of the primitive
clan; Rhythm and Symbolism in artistic and religious manifestations;
Participation in the cosmic forces, “special reasoning processes,”18
which, although neither prelogical nor alogical,19 do not necessarily
follow the Western mind or its syllogisms.20
Despite the tribulations of the race since the fifteenth century, de¬
spite slavery and colonization, cross-breeding and assimilation, these
characteristics remain in most individuals. Whatever their social status
and the overlay of Western influence, as long as they have remained
in a sufficiently large group, they retain more or less intact the traits
of specifically Negro African psychology, which gives their culture an
easily recognizable flavor: in music, the special rhythm of jazz, for
example; in poetry, a style which transforms any foreign language it
uses according to its own particular cadence and sensibility; in the
organization of social life, “palaver,” for example, as in Sekou Toure’s
Africanized Marxism, where the least decree is discussed and weighed
at length by the chiefs of even the smallest villages.
It was because they wanted to escape from these particular charac¬
teristics, intent that their negritude not show, that the West Indian
writers we spoke of earlier21 ended up producing impersonal works.
Their very failure proves to what extent the Negro temperament still
dominates individuals anxious to become Westernized, to the point
that the effort of suppressing it destroys all capacity to create.
But these characteristics of Negro culture must not be confused with
the imaginary “black essence” mentioned by Sartre.22 Race has noth¬
ing to do with this aspect of negritude. The black man is not from an
“essence” different from ours. Brought up in a completely white mi¬
lieu, isolated from his traditions, he will think, act, and create like a
white man. The case of Rene Maran is typical. Having lived all his
youth in France, in a boarding school, far from his parents and his
We believe that, rather than fall in line with your systems, we may bring you
something substantially new . . .; we may enrich you.27
23. Interview with Rene Maran, March 1959. See also chap. 6, below.
24. J. P. Sartre, “Orphee noir,” p. xliii.
25. Theodore Monod, quoted by Robert Delavignette in his preface to Karim, roman
senegalais, by Ousmane Soce (Paris: Nouvelles Editions Latines, 1948).
26. A. Diop, opening speech of the second congress. Published in the special issue
of Presence Afncaine, nos. 24-25 (February-May 1959), p. 41.
27. A. Diop, conference at the Centre International, Brussels, 4 March 1960.
108/ NEGRITUDE IS BORN
28. Frantz Fanon, L'an V de la revolution algenenne (Paris: Editions Maspero, 1959);
translated as A Dying Colonialism (New York: Grove, 1967).
29. “Resolutions concernant la litterature,” at the second congress, in Presence
Africaine, nos. 24-25 (February-May 1959), p. 389.
30. Ibid.
31. See chap. 17, note 19, below.
32. A. Cesaire, Cahier d'un retour, p. 88.
Negritude: Some Definitions, Sartre’s Negativity / 109
Un jour prochain
Je poserai a terre
Le lourd fardeau qui pese a mes epaules.33
But this time is soon past: “The old negritude is gradually dying.”34
We will no longer sing the sad, despairing spirituals,
Another song will spring forth from our throats.35
Today the black man holds up his head. We need not enumerate the
reasons here: the example of other colonized peoples such as India
and the Arab countries, the influence of communism, the increasing
number of black intellectuals, and the impotence of the Western mas¬
ter to maintain order in his own territories. All these have had their
effect. The black man now refuses to accept a fate imposed on him by
whites, refuses servitude, rejects the prejudices from which his race is
made to suffer—it is both a moral and a political revolt. He no longer
wishes to “assimilate himself, lose himself in the Other.” Different
from the white man, he wishes to play his own role and take pride in
it. He demands his rights and responsibilities as “a man-like-any-
other,”36 and finally he proclaims himself a Negro.
If he is oppressed for his race and because of it, he must first become aware
of his race. Those who have vainly attempted for centuries because he was a
Negro to reduce him to the animal level must be compelled to recognize him
as a man. There is no escape from this, no possibility of cheating, no way of
“crossing the line”: AJew, white among whites, may deny that he is Jewish and
declare himself a man among other men. A Negro cannot deny that he is a
Negro, nor claim to be part of this abstract, colorless humanity: He is black.
He is thus forced to be authentic. Insulted, enslaved, he draws himself up,
picks up the word “nigger” that has been thrown at him like a stone, and
proudly asserts himself as a black man facing the white man.37
33. Negro songs translated byj. Cassadesus in the review Minutes (Paris), February
1931. [Translator’s note: Although the themes are familiar, our English version is a
retranslation and not the original text, which is unknown. ]
34. A. Cesaire, Cahier dun retour, p. 88.
35. Jacques Roumain, Bois d'ebene (Port-au-Prince: H. Deschamps, 1945), p. 13.
36. Un homme pared aux autres, title of a novel by Rene Maran (Paris: Editions Arc-en-
Ciel, 1947).
37. J. P. Sartre, “Orphee noir,’’ pp. xiii-xiv.
110/NEGRITUDE IS BORN
The black now demands everything, both for his race and his civiliza¬
tion. He demands to be recognized and imposes this recognition by
appropriating our techniques and cultures. He demands not only
equal rights in the world, but also the right to enrich it.
Western contribution to the formation of our personality remains precious.
Yet we demand the right to enrich it and the right on our turn to give. Not only
to receive. . . . It is important for everyone to participate in the creative work
of humanity. The African presence will fit in usefully among the other pres¬
ences,” to the extent that Africa’s personality will have marked the develop¬
ment of sciences and art with the original seal of our concerns, our circum¬
stances, and our genius.38
For contemporary blacks there is no question of returning to the
“negritude of their origins”; they have different problems to solve
than those that faced the Askias of the Songhai! Yet they find their
strength in the sufferings of the recent past and in the will to re¬
gain and develop anew the cultures which had been thwarted by
colonization. They rely upon their history, sum total of their expe¬
rience. Included here is the constant factor of the black soul, a re¬
sult of ancestral African cultures. Alioune Diop sums this up clearly
in a formula indicating the two poles of negritude today: ‘‘Negri¬
tude ... is nothing but the Negro genius combined with the desire
to reveal the dignity of this genius.”39
To sum up: “The-being-in-the-world of blacks” now comprises the
constant element of “Negro genius”—namely a characteristic psychol¬
ogy, the result of an original civilization—to which are added the scars
of the Passion of the race, which will long remain impressed upon the
collective memory:
Each of my todays has eyes
that look upon my yesterdays
with rancor and with shame40
that can never be forgiven.” We had sought help from a friend of colored
peoples, and that friend had found no better response than to point out the
relativity of what they were doing. . . . Jean-Paul Sartre, in this work, has
destroyed black zeal.47
Fanon was the victim of his own too subtle reasoning, as were many
others. Sartre spoke as a philosopher and employed the word
‘‘negativity’’ in its proper sense, the Hegelian one, which is not at all
pejorative. Hegel regarded Mind too as negativity, as well as Liberty
and Conscience—all, in other words, that is opposed to the immediate.
Sartre explicitly calls on Hegelian dialectics here, the process in which
the first moment, of “thesis,” necessarily results in its opposite, “an¬
tithesis.” The resulting contest creates a third moment, “synthesis,”48
which retains all the perfections of the first two terms and cancels out
their imperfections. Hegel called this superior moment Aufhebung,
from the verb aufheben, which means, at one and the same time, to
excel, cancel, and retain. The “negative moment” of this process is not
therefore a sterile opposition that is content to deny the thesis without
adding anything positive to it and would be destined to disappear after
the contest. On the contrary, this “negative moment” brings forth new
qualities not contained in the first expression, which are imposed upon
“thesis” and later conserved in the “synthesis.” According to Hegel,
to deny the negation does not mean to reject it—as a court dismisses
a plaintiff—but rather to terminate a quarrel by recognizing the re¬
spective rights of both parties and thus reconciling them.
In “Orphee noir,” however, an essay intended for the general pub¬
lic, the word “negativity” was bound to be misunderstood. This tech¬
nical term of modern philosophy is not even mentioned in the La-
rousse dictionary of the period. For anyone unfamiliar with the
Hegelian usage, it was inevitable to mistakenly associate it with the
words negative, negatory, negation, etc., namely the “act of denying”
a positive affirmation. Sartre himself unintentionally encouraged the
misunderstanding. Having called the thesis an “assertion of white
supremacy,” he referred to the antithesis negritude only in the follow¬
ing terms: “negativity,” “upbeat,” “not sufficient by itself,” and “des¬
tined to destroy itself.” All this is true enough when one has Hegelian
synthesis in mind and realizes that the moment of negativity is also a
positive contribution which will remain! But Sartre, with a certain
47. Frantz Fanon, Peau noire, masques blancs (Paris: Seuil, 1952), pp. 135-36; translated
as Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove, 1967), pp. 133, 135.
48. In Hegelian dialectics, “thesis-antithesis-synthesis” are usually called “the three
moments.” In reality, however, Hegel called them “affirmation-negation-negation of the
negation.”
Negritude: Some Definitions, Sartre’s Negativity / 113
At the end of so rich a literary analysis, how could Sartre so limit his
conception of negritude? He seemed to consider it only from an angle
of opposition to the white man, thus mistaking a part for the whole
concept, which he himself had first given a far broader meaning. “The
being-in-the-world of blacks,” according to Sartre, covered all the
ways in which the black experienced his condition in the world:
through rhythm, sexual pantheism, a cosmic sense, “the indissoluble
unity of suffering, the erotic and joy,”50 etc. From a general viewpoint,
this situation did not necessarily imply the presence of whites. This is
why, with Senghor, we can speak of a “negritude of the sources,”
which existed before the arrival of Europeans. It is true that blacks
became aware of their “being-in-the-world” upon contact with whites.
The black man recognized his negritude but did not create it in re¬
sponse to whiteness. Having recognized his own qualities the black
man sets himself before the Other: Thesis and antithesis are thus face
to face, each asserting itself. “Synthesis,” we should again point out,
must destroy this opposition while retaining the values of each. This
had to be emphasized.
Sartre pursued his dialectical outline still further. At the moment of
synthesis, black and white will in fact have disappeared, leaving only
fellow creatures, men like one another, enriched by one another. Can
we follow him to this point?
“The Negro,” declared Sartre, “desires the abolition of all ethnic
privileges wherever they come from. He asserts his solidarity with all
the oppressed, no matter what their color. At once, the subjective [!],
existentialist, ethnic idea of negritude ‘passes over,’ as Hegel would
say, to the objective, positive, exact idea of a proletariat. ”51 Sartre adds
immediately that “the idea of race does not blend with the idea of class:
The former is concrete and specific, whereas the latter is universal and
abstract.”52 In spite of this, just as the proletariat “seeks a society
without classes,”53 the black man “aims to prepare the synthesis or
119
120/THE NEGRITUDE POETS
^Translator’s note: Though today French Guiana boasts a Space Research Center,
historically it is best known as a French penal colony.
9. Interview with Damas, June 1959.
10. See chap. 20, note 11, below.
11. J. P. Sartre, “Orphee noir,” p. xliii.
12. Interview withj. Rabemananjara, June 1959.
122/THE negritude poets
of the two aspects, nor to flounder in confusion. What makes the poets
we are going to present interesting is that they are truly cfeatovs. Their
words and pictures, syntax and rhythm, constantly reinforce or nuance
themes that are not present in French literature. And we are fascinated
by their ideas as much as by their way of bending the French language
to a sensibility foreign to it. These writers use other symbols, another
rhythm, and have other reactions than French authors do, at each
moment we are liable to misunderstand their vision of things, and
particularly to be offended by their special conception of the West.
To approach the first poetic works of these black writers of the new
school, one must remain alert and beware of one’s instinctive reflexes.
Sartre’s advice is pertinent.
Strong in our thousand years of literature, our Villons, our Racines, our
Rimbauds, what I particularly fear is that we will look down upon our black
friends’ poems and stories with the charmed indulgence shown by parents for
their offspring’s birthday compliments. Let us guard against seeing in these
products of the mind an homage to French culture. It is something quite
different. Culture is an instrument; we must not believe that they have chosen
ours. Had the English occupied Senegal rather than the French, the Senega¬
lese would have adopted English. The truth is that the blacks are trying to get
themselves together through a cultural world that was thrust upon them and
which is foreign to them. They must reshape this ready-made clothing. Every¬
thing in it irks them and feels awkward, even the syntax, and yet they have
learned to make use of this tool with all its deficiencies.13
13. J. P. Sartre, “Presence noire,” in the first issue of Presence Afncaine, November-
December 1947, p. 29.
Leon Damas:
1. Leon Damas, Pigments (Paris: Guy Levi Mano, 1937). Preface by Robert Desnos.
[Translator’s note: French texts of the poems cited in this chapter, however, conform
to those of the edition definitive of Pigments, published in Paris by Presence Africaine in
1962; reprinted with Nevralgies in 1972. Many of the translations appeared in Black World,
January 1972.]
123
124/THE NEGRITUDE POETS
Damas begins by rejecting everything Europe had made him and his
ancestors swallow by force. The poems reflect a veritable indiges¬
tion,” ranging from nausea to regurgitation, from despair to insults
and threats.
A nausea that comes at first for no apparent reason:
2. “Obsession.”
3. “II est des nuits” (“There are nights”).
Leon Damas: Pigments / 125
Treve de blues
de martelements de piano
de trompette bouchee
de folie claquant des pieds
a la satisfaction du rythme
[Enough of blues
pianos banging
muted trumpet
mad feet tapping
to satisfy the rhythm
[Enough letting-go-of
licking-up-to
taking-the-leavings
and
enough
of that attitude
of super-assimilation]
The nausea then takes shape, and the poet sees himself lucidly,
without any concession: the elegant Leon Damas, strutting about to
impress his friends with the refinement of his clothes; Leon Damas
parading in drawing rooms, suddenly catching sight of himself.
J’ai l’impression d’etre ridicule
dans leurs souliers
dans leur smoking
dans leur plastron
dans leur faux-col
dans leur monocle
dans leur melon
[I feel ridiculous
in their shoes
their dinner jackets
their starched shirts
and detachable collars
their monocles and
their bowler hats
I feel ridiculous
in their drawing rooms
in their manners
their bowings and scrapings
in their manifold need of monkeyshines]
[I feel ridiculous
among them
like an accomplice
among them
like a pimp
6. “Solde” (“Sellout”).
7. Ibid.
Leon Damas: Pigments / 127
Et puis et puis
et puis au nom du Pere
du Fils
du Saint Esprit
a la fin de chaque repas
Taisez-vous
Vous ai-je ou non dit qu’il vous fallait parler frangais
le frangais de France
le frangais du frangais
le frangais fran^ais
Desastre
parlez-moi du desastre
parlez-m’en
Desastre
parlez-moi du desastre
parlez-m’en
And then
and then
there was in the name of the Father
and the Son
and the Holy Ghost
at the end of every meal
Calamity
Disasters
And how!
Disaster
talk about disaster
130/THE NEGRITUDE POETS
Doesn’t he know that these whites, who have been held up to him
as models, at bottom despise him? He is a “Negro.” His fine manners
10. “Realite.”
Leon Damas: Pigments / 131
cannot change this. His fine education may pass muster in the West
Indies among the natives, but in France there is no escape: “All
negroes are niggers.’’11 Frantz Fanon has well described this phe¬
nomenon:
The evidence was there, implacable. My blackness was there, dense and
indisputable. ... I was walled in; neither my polished manners, my literary
knowledge, nor my understanding of the quantum theory mattered. . . . There
was the myth of the Negro. ... I was repeatedly told about cannibalism, mental
backwardness, fetishism, racial defects. . . ,12
[ . . . mocking, laughing
at my beggar clothes
amused
to see a nigger with
empty eyes and belly]
Redevenu moi-meme
nouveau moi-meme
de ce que Hier j’etais
hier
sans complexity
hier
quand est venue l’heure du deracinement.
11. Letter from Frantz Fanon to M. J. Beclard, quoted in “La poesie noire de langue
fran^aise et revolution de la litterature africaine,” unpublished thesis submitted for
licentiate’s degree at the Institut Universitaire des Territoires d’Outre-mer, Brussels,
1953.
12. Frantz Fanon, Peau noire, masques blancs, pp. 120 and 1 16.
13. “Un clochard m’a demande dix sous” (“A beggar asked me for a dime”).
14. Limbe is a Creole word meaning “spleen” or, more colloquially, “blues.”
132/THE NEGRITUDE POETS
[Give me back
my black
dolls so that I can play
the simple games of my instincts
song
rhythm
effort
foot path
water
huts
the smoke-grey earth
the wisdom
the words
the palavers
the elders
the cadence
the hands
beating time
the hands
the feet marking time
upon the ground
In this evocation of what he has lost, the poet rediscovers the rhythm
of Negro tom-toms, expressing a manner of suffering that is non-
European, authentic at last. From the same Negro rhythm, Senghor
would extrapolate a law of African culture to uncover all its richness:
It is the architecture of the being, the inner dynamic which gives it form, the
system of waves which it emits to others, the pure expression of the vital force.
Rhythm is the vibrating shock, the force which, through the senses, reaches
to the root of our being . . . directing all tangible things toward the light of
the spirit.15
If Damas still has this rhythm, it is the last thing he has left. The West
Indian, infinitely more than the African, is dispossessed, the middle
class more so than the working man. Damas knows the tragic past of
his race:
. . . coups de corde noueux
de corps calcines
de l’orteil au dos calcines
de chair morte
de tisons
de fer rouge
de bras brises
sous le fouet qui se dechatne
sous le fouet qui fait marcher la plantation
et s’abreuver de sang de mon sang de sang la sucrerie
et la bouffarde du commandeur craner au ciel.16
My hatred swells
at the scope of their villainy
the scope of the fleecing
the pitching
of cruel slaveships
and their fetid cargoes
My hatred swells
around the limits of the culture
the limits of the theories
the tales
they thought they ought
to stuff me with
from the cradle onward
while
everything within me
wants only to be black
as negro as the Africa they robbed me of.]
[Then
I’ll put your feet in it
or simply rub your nose in it
in all that capital letter shit
Colonization
Civilization
Assimilation
and the rest]
as much as you
if not more practiced at it
I have a nose for social nuance
the word for each occasion
the understanding wink
Damas wants to shock the whites and make them say: “What, such
a well-bred fellow!” Twenty years after Pigments, the same theme re¬
turns in Black-Label:
malgre les rafles
malgre les flics
malgre les fouilles
voila
qu’il recommence
qu’il recommence a dire
Merde.23
there he goes
he’s at it again
back to saying
Shit.]
a jamais d’etre
un homme
Et rien
rien ne saurait autant calmer ma haine
qu’une belle mare
de sang
faite
de ces coutelas tranchants
qui mettent a nu
les mornes a rhum24
And nothing
nothing would so calm my hate
as a great
pool
of blood
made
by those long sharp knives
that strip the hills of cane
for rum]
And now hatred really spurs him on, draws him upright. Proudly
tanding, eyes open at last, he proclaims his negritude:
Avec d’autres
des alentours
avec d’autres
quelques rares
j’ai au toit de ma case
jusqu’ici garde
l’ancestrale foi conique
Et l’arrogance automatique
des masques
des masques de chaux vive
[With others
from the neighborhood
a few rare friends
till now I’ve kept
the conical ancestral faith
high among the rafters of my hut
25. “Shine.”
Leon Damas: Pigments / 141
26. “Ils ont.” [Translator’s note: Mme Kesteloot perhaps misreads this poem as a
threat. See rather such poems of Damas as “Et caetera,” “Si souvent,” and “Sur une
carte postale.”]
142/THE NEGRITUDE POETS
fate of a civilization that had crushed them and was slowly disintegrat¬
ing? The tide of racism was growing in Europe. France and Germany
were wearing themselves out, raising one generation of children after
another “living the obsession with some revenge to take.”27 Already
the two countries were preparing new sacrifices to the patriotic and
capitalistic myth:
Rien que pour le fonctionnement
d’usines a canons
obus
balles
la guerre
elle
elle va bientot venir
s’enivrer encore a la marseillaise
de chair fumante28
Me
I ask them
to begin
by invading Senegal]
The final poem in Pigments, therefore, is an invitation to direct ac¬
tion. Damas, a West Indian, was speaking directly to the Senegalese.
Paradoxically, it was in the Ivory Coast that his message was heard.
Translated into Baoule,30 his vivid, rhythmic, incisive style struck
home in 1939 with Ivorians, who recited his poems while resisting the
military draft. Pigments was immediately banned. From its first publica¬
tion, the new poetry of negritude revealed itself as revolutionary—and
effectively so, because it touched the feelings of the entire black race.
The words of a West Indian were inspiring Africans. A new idiom had
been created that all Africans could understand despite their six hun¬
dred different languages and dialects. The response gave the young
poets in Paris confidence that they had hit upon the right tone of voice.
No matter what language they wrote in, they felt “black,” they were
talking “black.”
Damas knew he was a precursor. He has called Pigments the forerun¬
ner to Cesaire’s Cahier d'un retour aupays natal. Both Cesaire and Seng-
hor, as a matter of fact, were later to build on Damas’s experience,
although Damas as a poet remained silent for years. He did not cease
to write, however. In 1938 he published a virulent book of articles,
Retour de Guyane. In 1943, he published a collection of Guianese sto¬
ries.31 In 1947, it was Damas who edited the first anthology of poets
from the French colonies.32 In 1948 he published adaptations of Afri¬
can folk songs,33 and in 1952, a collection of delicate love lyrics, Graffiti.
But he had abandoned his original inspiration and accepted the con¬
spiracy of silence he alludes to in Black-Label. Black-Label did not ap¬
pear until 1956, although Damas had begun it many years earlier.34 It
The first few poems in Pigments, which we have not yet discussed,
were influenced by surrealism. They enclose a secret or attempt to
seize a fleeting impression. Damas was tempted by the hermetic man¬
ner, particularly through the poetry of Mallarme, which he had read
a great deal between 1920 and 1930.35 Damas was more closely at¬
tached to the French surrealist poets—Aragon and Desnos, for exam¬
ple—than his colleagues were, but he managed rather early to detach
himself enough from their influence to develop a personal style. The
majority of the poems in the Pigments have the Damas “stamp”: their
beat; the use of everyday words, occasionally crude, but never prosaic;
the inimitable offhand humor, full of disrespectful banter; the sen¬
sitivity to every nuance. “Damas’s poetry is essentially unsophisticated.
. . . It is direct, crude, brutal at times, but never vulgar.”36 This was
Senghor’s opinion of his friend. He grasped the fundamentals.
Unlike his two fellow poets, Damas definitely did not have a bent for
amplification. The soft, hazy drapery of Senghor’s verse is foreign to
him; he has none of Cesaire’s splashing imagery, extensive vocabulary,
or visionary gifts. This is doubtless why Damas’s star paled before the
more dazzling works of his successors. It is regrettable, because in
rereading Pigments one realizes that no one has replaced Damas. No
other poet has matched his dry, vivid style, extraordinarily effective in
its very starkness; his astonishing flippancy, the audacity and elegance
even of his insults; in short, his freedom! Some of Damas’s poems are
so close to the spoken word that one seems to hear him personally
reciting them, even inventing them as he goes along. Notice, for exam¬
ple, the amazing spontaneity of this tirade written, it would seem,
under the lash of emotion, after reading a newspaper item announcing
that “in response to a German threat, Senegalese War Veterans have
cabled an expression of their unremitting loyalty to France”:
de decaves
de grands blesses
de mutiles
de calcines
de gangrenes
de gueules cassees
de bras coupees
d’intoxiques
et patati et patata
et caetera futurs anciens
Moi
je leur dis
merde et
d’autres choses encore
Moi
je leur demande
de taire le besoin qu’ils ressentent
de piller
de voler
de violer
de souiller a nouveau les bords antiques
du Rhin
n.c.o.’s
broken-down
decorated
mutilated
poison-gassed
disabled
disfigured
alcoholic
amputee
past and present soldiers
et cetera et cetera
Me
I say shit
and that’s just half of it
Me
I ask them to
shove
their bayonets
their sadistic fits
the feeling
the knowing
they have
filthy
dirty
jobs to do
Me
I ask them
to conceal the need they feel
to pillage
rape
and steal
to soil the old banks of the Rhine anew
Me
I ask them
to begin
by invading Senegal
Me
I call on them
to leave the Krauts in peace!]
The lean, incisive spoken style exactly expresses his ideas. And if
Damas had but one thought, he did not wrap it up in ribbons and fog:
ose
a la maniere
du Juif
du Jaune
pour l’evasion organisee en masse
de l’inferiorite
38. “Realite.”
148/THE NEGRITUDE POETS
Bientot
je n’aurai pas que danse
bientot
je n’aurai pas que chante
bientot
je n’aurai pas que frotte
bientot
je n’aurai pas que trempe
bientot
je n’aurai pas que danse
chante
frotte
trempe
frotte
39. “Position.”
Leon Damas: Pigments / 149
chante
danse
Bientot40
[Soon
I’ll not only have danced
soon
I’ll not only have sung
soon
I’ll not only have polished
soon
I’ll not only have sweated
soon
I’ll not only have danced
sung
polished
sweated
polished
sung
danced
Soon]
Damas poses riddles and lets the reader complete his thoughts,
cleverly drawing him into the game. His style has the advantage of
being very flexible; it is the style of a juggler who adapts himself
marvelously to any trick, especially to any turn of wit. Damas is full of
ellipses and allusions, unexpected associations and puns:
40. “Bientot.”
150/THE NEGRITUDE POETS
♦Translator’s note: Pun: In French, rum as in rumcake is spelled rhum, while enrhume
is the word for having a cold, i.e., the rumcakes are drippy, as if they had a cold.
fTranslator’s note: At the time Damas wrote Pigments, the same history books were
used in all elementary schools throughout France and the French colonies. The first
sentence was “Nos ancetres le Gaulois . . .” (“Our ancestors the Gauls . . .”).
Leon Damas: Pigments / 151
How ever special this wit is, we would not dare call it “Negro.” It
is rather, as Senghor puts it, “a reaction to human imbalance.” Is not
“white” wit often the same thing? Think of Jacques Prevert or Charlie
Chaplin? Damas has much in common with them.
Another aspect of Damas’s poetry, another string of his “banjo,” is
nostalgia and tenderness. The two most beautiful poems in Pigments,
“Regard” and “Limbe,” are in this minor tone. In “Regard,” the
bohemian, his weapons abandoned, finding anew his brother Rute-
bceuf, says with the same sincere voice, full of emotion:
M’acheterez-vous
m’acheterez-vous dites
152/THE NEGRITUDE POETS
des fleurs
que sais-je
pour qu’au bistrot de Tangle
pour qu’au bistrot de Tangle
j’aille
ranimer l’atre
d’un grand verre de bordeaux
[Later on
later on in life
when my eyes are shrivelled
Later on
later on in life
when my eyes are mock Chinese
Later on
later on in life
when everything is gone
when everything has left me
but the theory
when everything but the theory
has let me down
Later on in life
later on
when the bent back
is preceded by the cane
that keeps old bodies going
Tell me
will you buy
will you buy
my flowers
who knows
so I can go
down to the corner bar
down to the corner bar
to light this old hearth up
with a big glass of bordeaux]
la coutume
les jours
la vie
Leon Damas: Pigments / 153
la chanson
le rythme
l’effort
le sender
l’eau
la case
la terre enfumee grise
la sagesse
les mots
les palabres
les vieux
la cadence
les mains
la mesure
les mains
les pietinements
le sol
[ways
days
life
song
rhythm
effort
footpath
water
huts
the smoke-grey earth
the wisdom
the words
the palavers
the elders
the cadence
the hands
beating time
the hands
the feet
marking time
upon the ground]
Customs rule the days of which life is made. Song, by its rhythm,
encourages work and effort. In two lines Damas evokes the hut with
its path to the water and the open, smoky fire. The elders, too, whose
wisdom is expressed in the words they speak at the “palavers.” Finally,
the dance with hands beating time—note the repetition—and feet
stamping the ground!
And this brings us to the rhythmic features of Damas’s poetry, ap¬
parently the foremost stylistic concern in his work, which always seems
154/THE NEGRITUDE POETS
Moi aussi
avec des yeux qui tendent
la main
j’ai soutenu
la putain de misere
Moi aussi
j’ai eu faim dans ce sacre foutu pays
moi aussi j’ai cru pouvoir
demander dix sous
par pitie pour mon ventre
creux
Moi aussi
jusqu’au bout de l’eternite de leurs
boulevards a flics
combien de nuits ai-je du
m’en aller
moi aussi
les yeux creux
Moi aussi
j’ai eu faim les yeux creux
Leon Damas: Pigments / 155
I too
pimped
for poverty the whore
I too
to the end of the eternity
of their cop-filled streets
how many nights have I
too had to turn away
with hollow eyes
and belly
empty]
Again, in “Obsession,” Damas begins each verse with the same
phrase: “a taste of blood comes”; similarly in “II est des nuits” each
stanza begins “There are nights with no name,” and in Solde each
begins with “I feel ridiculous.”
In “Limbe,” besides using this same method, Dames employs a very
suggestive “diminuendo” finale.
Et les sabots
des betes de somme
qui martelent en Europe
l’aube indecise encore
me rappellent
l’abnegation etrange
des trays41 matineux
repus
qui rythment aux Antilles
les hanches des porteuses
en file indienne
Et l’abnegation etrange
des trays matineux
repus
qui rythment aux Antilles
les hanches des porteuses
en file indienne
me rappellent
les sabots
des betes de somme
qui martelent en Europe
l’aube indecise encore
41. In Guiana and in the West Indies, the “tray” is a large, rectangular, wooden tray
with high sides.
158/THE NEGRITUDE POETS
in Europe
of beasts of burden
beating out
the still uncertain dawn]
42. For example, the one quoted by Senghor in his Anthologie, p. 18.
Aime Cesaire:
Cahier d'un retour au pays natal
1. The word is Senghor’s. He was present at the birth of Cahier and called it a
“parturition in suffering” (Ethiopiques [Paris: Seuil], p. 104).
2. Aime Cesaire, Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (Paris: Presence Africaine, 1956). The
quotations given are taken from this last edition, which we indicate as Cahier. The page
numbers given in parenthesis are those of that edition.
3. Details given by Cesaire in the course of an interview in March 1959.
159
160/THE NEGRITUDE POETS
and Creole charm4 had oft been repeated by other poets. How dis¬
cordant this voice speaking of the “hungry Antilles, these pock-marked
Antilles, Antilles dynamited by alcohol, shipwrecked in the mud of this
bay, in the dust of this town, dismally stranded” (p. 26); this voice
tersely denouncing the lies of some, the illusion of others:
Au bout du petit matin, l’extreme, trompeuse desolee eschare sur la bles-
sure des eaux; les martyrs qui ne temoignent pas; les fleurs du sang qui se
fanent et s’eparpillent dans le vent inutile comme des cris de perroquets
babillards; une vieille vie menteusement souriante, ses levres ouvertes d’an-
goisses desaffectees; une vieille misere pourissant sous le soleil, silencieuse-
ment; un vieux silence crevant de pustules tiedes . . .[p. 26]
[Shortly after dawn, this last deceptive desolated scab, this wound upon the
waters; martyrs who do not bear witness, flowers of blood that fade and scatter
in the wind as useless as the cries of babbling parrots; an old life deceitfully
smiling, its eyes open on alienated anguish; an old hovel silently rotting under
the sun; an old silence bursting with lukewarm pustules . . .]
[In this inert town, the noisy crowd so surprisingly missing the point of its
noise . . . this crowd that overlooks its cries of hunger, misery, revolt and hate;
this crowd so strangely talkative and mute . . . ]
sky, a mass of fear” (p. 29) and also “these worn-out men,” “this
accelerated stench of corruption,” and, dominating them all, pervasive
Hunger:
[And neither the teacher in his classroom nor the priest at catechism can get
a word out of this sleepy little nigger, in spite of the energetic way they both
have of drumming on his close-cropped head . . .
for his voice is forgotten in a quicksand of hunger
and there is nothing really nothing to be had
from this worthless little nobody
but hunger a hunger that no longer cares to
clamber up the rigging to his voice
dull, sluggish hunger
a hunger buried in the deeper Hunger
of this famished hill.]
Of course, there are always the feast days, when the “wild and
foolish ways to revive the golden splash of happy moments” (p. 32) are
rediscovered, when exuberance takes its revenge on quotidian restric¬
tions and bursts into song, dance, and revelry. This is what the for¬
eigner remembers, talks about, takes pictures of: the natives’ gaiety.7
But the morning after such drunken nights, what do these people
waken to? “A prostrate life, with no place to put its snuffed-out
dreams, the dream of life disconsolately torpid in its bed” (p. 37) and
the resignation of this city which “creeps on its hands without ever any
wish to pierce the sky with a stance of protest” (p. 37); “the shack
blistered like a peach tree suffering from blight, and the worn roof,
patched with bits of kerosene cans, . . . and the bed of planks from
which my race has sprung ... its mattress of dried banana leaves and
rags” (pp. 38-39).
This is the setting! For actors, let us take any average family: “an-
6. Mornes: hillocks on the outskirts of Martiniquan towns, on which the slum areas are
usually located. For Cesaire, these monies are the very symbol of West Indian poverty.
7. Even the best movies do not avoid this fault—Marcel Camus’s Black Orpheus, for
example.
162/THE NEGRITUDE POETS
other stinking little house on a very narrow street, a tiny house that
harbors in its guts of rotting wood dozens of rats and the turbulence
of my six brothers and sisters, a cruel little house whose intransigence
made us panic at the end of every month . . . and my mother, whose
limbs for our tireless hunger pedal, pedal day and night” (p. 37). This
is the true face of the “happy Antilles,” Cesaire s Martinique, his
anguish, his passion:
lies cicatrices des eaux
lies evidence de blessures
lies miettes
lies informes [p. 80]
“This bulk, this plunder, this earth” where “men have abandoned
their courage,” “deaf land brutally sealed off at every opening,” he
writes elsewhere.8
Cesaire spent his childhood in the setting we have just described; he
was the little pickaninny drowsy with hunger; his was the poverty-
stricken family in the village of Basse-Pointe! In the single word “par-
tir” (“to leave”), which ends his description of the West Indies, Cesaire
summarizes the dreams of his youth. Stifled and disgusted, it was ‘ with
voluptuous pleasure” that he left Martinique to continue his studies in
France.
The rest of the Cahier retraces the stages of Cesaire’s self-discovery.
What position would he take toward this prostrate homeland of his?
What was it, and what ought he to do?
His first impulse was “to leave” in order to take up the burden of
all oppressed people of the world:
Je serai un homme-juif
un homme-cafre
un homme-hindou-de-Calcutta
un homme-de-Harlem-qui-ne-vote-pas
L’homme famine, I’homme insulte, l’homme torture [p. 39]
But at the heart of this redemptive ideal, there was a secret weakness.
Refusing to look it in the face, Cesaire was submerging the lowliness
of his people in the great current of universal pain. He was taking on
the noble role of Pure Hero come to save the powerless, but one who
holds himself above them because he is not of their race.
. . . Mon coeur bruissait de generosites emphatiques. . . .
j’arriverais lisse et jeune dans ce pays mien et je dirais a ce pays
. . .«J’ai longtemps erre et je reviens vers la hideur desertee de vos
plaies. »[p. 41]
Adore le Zambeze.
L’etendue de ma perversite me confond! [p. 50]
[Voom rooh oh
voom rooh oh
charming snakes and conjuring the
dead
voom rooh oh
bringing down rain, provoking
tidal waves
voom rooh oh
preventing the darkness from coming
voom rooh oh may my heavens
open
166/THE NEGRITUDE POETS
[There are lagoons in my memory. They are covered with heads of the dead.
Not with water lilies.
There are lagoons in my memory. Women’s clothes are not spread out along
their banks.
My memory is surrounded with blood. My memory has a belt of corpses.]
The Negro has not forgotten the rebellions crushed and his race’s
enslavement in the name of convenient prejudices:
(les negres-sont-tous-les-memes, je-vous-le-dis
les vices-tous-les-vices, c’est-moi-qui-vous-le-dis
l’odeur-du-negre, ga-fait-pousser-la-canne
rappelez-vous-le-vieux-dicton:
battre-un-negre, c’est le nourrir) [p. 58]
[(Niggers-are-all-alike, I-tell-you
vices-all-the-vices, I-tell-you
the-smell-of-nigger makes-the-cane-grow
remember-the-old-saying:
beat-a-nigger-and-you-feed-him)]
He has not forgotten the humiliation of nigger clowns amusing the
wealthy in search of entertainment:
Obscenes gaiment, tres doudous de jazz
sur leur
exces d’ennui
Je sais le tracking, le Lindy-hop et les
claquettes. [p. 58]
Nothing could induce the Martiniquan to revolt once and for all
against the worst humiliations:
. . . et Ton nous marquait au fer rouge et nous dormions dans nos excrements
et I on nous vendait sur les places et l’aune de drap anglais et la viande salee
d’lrlande coutaient moins cher que nous, et ce pays etait calme, tranquille,
disant que l’esprit de Dieu etait dans ses actes. [p. 62]
[. . . and they branded us with hot irons and we slept in our excrement and
they sold us in the public squares and a bolt of English cloth or a side of salted
meat from Ireland cost less than we did, and this land was calm, tranquil,
proclaiming that the Spirit of the Lord was in its actions.]
Cesaire, the rebel who was defying the white man with great shouts
bursting from the strength of his race, no longer attempts to escape
his reality. He is is part of it like all the others:
Tiede petit matin de chaleur et de peur
ancestrales
Aime Cesaire: Cahier d'un retour au pays natal / 169
From this moment, accepting true participation in his race, its suffer¬
ings and its humiliations, Cesaire understands it better; he now has
access to the real “reserves” of his people’s humanity. Their virtue
does not lie in pride or a capacity to vanquish the world, nor in the
grandiose rebellions the poet has just sung of! Their virtue lies pre¬
cisely in all that he rejected: the “landscape of pain” whose uttermost
recesses have been explored by the former slaves; the ancestral values
maintained despite exile and servitude; the capacity to understand the
world intuitively, to adapt oneself to it rather than try to dominate it;
and the never forgotten contact with cosmic forces, symbols, and
myths.
Cesaire draws from these sources the courage to accept the deficien¬
cies of his people. As “earth more and more abandons the earth,” that
is to say, as the white world becomes dehumanized, these deficiencies
seemed to him all the more precious.13
No, negritude is not “a speck of dead water on the earth’s dead eye.”
elle plonge dans la chair rouge du sol
elle plonge dans la chair ardente du ciel
elle troue l’accablement opaque de sa
droite patience [p. 71]
The poet gathers all these strengths of his black people; he becomes
their spokesman before the Universe; he solemnly vows to arouse them
from their torpor, to defend them and help them to develop:
172/THE NEGRITUDE POETS
[. . . what I wish
for the universal hunger
for the universal thirst
is to shake it free at last
to summon from its inner depths
the succulence of fruit.]
in the roots of his own people, Cesaire understands that only this
“descent into hell”14 makes him capable of saving, through his coun¬
trymen, the entire black race. So he no longer refuses his destiny:
J’accepte . . . j’accepte . . . entierement, sans
reserve . . .
ma race qu’aucune ablution d’hysope et
de lys meles ne pourrait purifier
ma race rongee de macules
J’accepte. J’accepte.
et le negre fustige qui dit:« Pardon mon maitre»
et les vingt-neuf coups de fouet legal
et le cachot de quatre pieds de haut
et le carcan a branches
et le jarret coupe a mon audace marronne15
et la fleur de lys qui flue du fer rouge
sur le gras de mon epaule . . . [pp. 77-78]
I accept. I accept.
the flogged nigger who cries “Forgive me master”
and the twenty-nine legal blows of the whip
and the dungeon four feet high
and the spiked iron collar
and the hamstring cut for my runaway audacity
and the fleur-de-lis streaming from the brand iron
on my shoulder . . .]
And the poet’s total identification with his people finally produces a
miracle:
Et voici soudain que force et vie m’assaillent
14. A recognized expression since Sartre compared the black poet to Orpheus. The
success of this expression is also due in part to the analogy to the title of the poem, “Une
saison en enfer” (“A season in hell ”) by Rimbaud, a poet to whom, not without reason,
Cesaire has often been compared. In any case, it appears to us perfectly valid: The
tortured inner experience of the author of the Cahier is truly a painful descent into hell.
15. See our definition of the escaped slave, chap. 17, note 19, below. In our text we
refer to punishments really inflicted on slaves and mentioned in the Black Code: See
Victor Schoelcher’s book, Esclavage et colonisation (Paris: PUF, 1948).
174/THE NEGRITUDE POETS
debout
et
libre [pp. 87-88]
upright
and
free]
16. Cesaire has no desire to see blacks fall into the error of racism, for which he blames
Europeans: “Keep me, my heart, from any hatred.”
176/THE NEGRITUDE POETS
Une detresse cette plage elle aussi, avec ses tas d’ordure pourrissant, ses
croupes furtives qui se soulagent, et le sable est noir, funebre, on n’a jamais
vu un sable si noir, et l’ecume glisse dessus en glapissant, et la mer la frappe
a grands coups de boxe, ou plutot la mer est un gros chien qui leche et mord
la plage aux jarrets, et a force de la mordre elle finira par la devorer, bien sur,
la plage et la rue Paille avec. [pp. 38-39]
Aime Cesaire: Cahier d'un retour au pays natal / 177
[The beach appalling too with its heaps of rotting garbage, furtive rumps
relieving themselves, and the sand black, funereal—never has one seen sand
so black—with sea-froth slithering over it with a yelping sound, and the sea
striking great blows, or rather the sea is like a huge dog licking and biting the
beach, biting it so fiercely that it will finally devour it, the beach and the rue
Paille along with it.]
17. The Yugoslav scholar P. Guberina’s original phrase, used in his preface to the
1956 edition of the Cahier.
178/THE NEGRITUDE POETS
From this point on, the Cahier continues, alternating rhythmic po¬
etry with prose passages never more than two pages long. Was there
an organic reason for this construction, or is it only a literary device?
This is what we must now discover.
We have said Cesaire wished to disengage himself from a reality that
was obsessive. Senghor writes that Cesaire used his pen “the way Louis
Armstrong uses his trumpet, or more exactly perhaps, as the Voodoo
faithful use their tom-toms. Cesaire needs to lose himself in a verbal
dance to the rhythm of a tom-tom, in order to rediscover himself in
the cosmos.”18 We fully agree with Senghor’s judgment, adding that
Cesaire’s method, even if it is a more natural one, has no other aim,
and is of the same kind as Rimbaud’s use of opium or Henri Michaux’s
of mescaline. Cesaire’s “verbal tom-tom” follows a fairly simple
rhythm, dictated by the poet’s emotion or by his search for a corre¬
sponding harmony. It is often marked by a downbeat on the first
words, repeated at the beginning of the line.19
Ce qui est a moi
c’est un homme seul emprisonne de
blanc
c’est un homme seul qui defie les cris
blancs de la mort blanche
(TOUSSAINT, TOUSSAINT
LOUVERTURE)
[This is mine
a man alone
imprisoned in white
a man alone who defies the white
cries of white
death
(TOUSSAINT, TOUSSAINT
LOUVERTURE)
from this point on, it is death that gives urgency to the rhythm. It
circles above Toussaint, embraces him, penetrates him and soon pos¬
sesses him entirely. The rhythm grows slower, more staccato as he
succumbs—until finally it expands outward in the last two lines sug¬
gesting final peace and silence!
A word, an image, can also unleash in the poet a violent reaction that
results in a change of rhythm. As we have seen, the very mention of
leaving the West Indies is so disturbing that the poem suddenly re¬
flects that sharp emotion. Cesaire reacts in the same manner when he
recalls the resignation of the “good nigger toward his kind master in
the face of injustice and ill treatment. We feel his anger gradually
mounting. With the ending of his evocation on the word “negraille
(“niggertrash”), the insult stings him personally. He breaks loose,
hurling his shouts at us as if to the beat of African war drums:
Et elle est debout la negraille
la negraille assise
inattendument debout
debout dans la cale
debout dans les cabines
debout sur le pont
debout dans le vent
debout dans le soleil
debout dans le sang
debout
et
libre [pp. 87-88]
20. A ritual process fairly common to many religions, with the aim of putting man in
Aime Cesaire: Cahier d'un retour au pays natal / 181
thrall by the power of words and images which increase his inner
tension, the poet gives free rein to his thoughts, becoming a magi or
medium. His words seem charged with supernatural power. They
cease to be words and become “parts of a world . . . delirious conti¬
nents . . . swamp fevers . . . lavas . . . blazing cities” (p. 55).
He makes threats and his anger is dreadful. Words lose their usual
meaning to take on an obscure significance and form baffling pict¬
ures.
Parfois on me voit d’un grand geste du
cerveau, happer un nuage trop rouge
ou une caresse de pluie, ou un prelude
du vent,
ne vous tranquilisez pas outre mesure:
Je force la membrane vitelline qui me
separe de moi-meme,
Je force les grandes eaux qui me ceinturent de sang
C’est moi rien que moi qui arrete ma
place sur le dernier train de la derniere
vague du dernier raz de maree
C’est moi rien que moi
qui prends langue avec la derniere
angoisse
C’est moi oh, rien que moi
qui m’assure au chalumeau
les premieres gouttes de lait virginal! [pp. 55-56]
contact with the higher Powers. Indispensable in African ceremonies and especially in
voodoo rites, where “possession” is obtained only by means of a series of incantations.
This is also present in litanies, in the telling of beads and in Christian prayers.
182/THE NEGRITUDE POETS
But these hypnotic trances are not the ultimate state of Cesaire s
poetic impulse. Through them he tries to attain ecstasy. The attempts
often fail, the inspiration carrying the poet sinks and abandons him,
disappointed, once more immobilized.
Sur cette terre exorcisee, larguee a la derive de sa precieuse intention ma-
lefique, cette voix qui crie, lentement enrouee, vainement, vainement enrouee
et il n’y a que les fientes accumuiees de nos mensonges—et qui ne repondent
pas. [p. 59]
[Upon this exorcized world, cast off to the drifting of its precious, evil purpose,
this shouting voice, slowly getting hoarse, vainly, vainly hoarse and there is
nothing left but the accumulated droppings of our lies—which do not reply.]
[The industrious malevolent thumb, one could see, had shaped his forehead
with a lump, pierced the nose with two parallel alarming tunnels, elongated
the huge lip, and in a masterstroke of caricature had planed, polished, and
varnished the tiniest, most adorable little ear in all creation.]
But the description of this reality quickly provokes loathing and revolt,
dynamic feelings that call for the transformation of a situation now
unbearable. Once more the rhythm changes from prose to verse. Once
more Cesaire becomes witch doctor, Oracle. He makes prophesies,
exorcizes, conjures. At last the trances lead to a “state of grace.” The
prophet then becomes a demigod, re-creating in words the world of
his desire, marvelously crystallized in his poems. No longer anger,
clenched hands, or gnashing teeth, but a free gushing forth of joy,
where the soul is peaceful, releasing tenderness and love.
il y a sous la reserve de ma luette une bauge de sangliers
il y a tes yeux qui sont sous la pierre grise du jour un conglomerat
fremissant de coccinelles
21. Occasionally the qualities of this prose form real poems which could be taken out
of the context of the Cahier because of their individual merit, as for example, the picture
of the Negro, a passage of which we quote, and the description of Christmas in the West
Indies (pp. 33-36) or the parable of the Martiniquan horse traders (pp. 60-61).
Aime Cesaire: Cahier d'un retour au pays natal / 183
May my words calm and soothe the child who does not know the
map of springtime must always be drawn anew
the grasses will sway for the cattle, gentle vessels of hope
the long drunken swell of the sea
the stars in the setting of a never-seen ring
will cut through the crystal organ pipes of evening and
then spread across the rich extremity of my fatigue
zinnias
coryanthases
and you star from your luminous buttocks may you draw forth a
family
of lemurs
from the unfathomable sperm of man
inaudacious shape
that woman’s trembling womb carries like a mineral!]
[and . . .
through the noontime clicking of the sea
through the budding sun at midnight
listen sweepnet that holds the keys to the orient
disarmed by the day
by the hurtling stones of rain
listen dogfish that guards the Occident
listen white dog of the north
black serpent of noon
who complete the girdling of the sky
there is still an ocean to cross
still a sea to cross
so that I may invent my lungs
so that the prince will be quiet
so that the queen will kiss me
still an old man to assassinate
a madman to rescue
so that my soul may shine bark shine
bark bark bark
and so that the owl my beautiful serious angel may hoot
Master of laughter?
Master of formidable silence?
Aime Cesaire: Cahier d'un retour au pays natal / 185
These moments are also very brief. Scarcely are they reached but the
poet already feels they are escaping him and tries to prolong them with
a prayer. It is not to God that Cesaire prays.22 He draws from these
too brief moments of ecstasy the strength to continue the mission he
has given himself and vows to remain faithful to his race, to give it
access to the pure universe he has glimpsed:
Mais avant d’aborder aux futurs vergers
donnez-moi de les meriter sur leur ceinture de mer
donnez-moi mon coeur en attendant le sol
Such are the main points in the structure of the Cahier, its relation
to what we might call Cesaire’s psychological motivation. Let us now
examine the style.
We have already spoken of the Cahier s rhythm—an important char¬
acteristic, for Cesaire is a Negro and therefore does not separate po¬
etry from rhythm, as we will demonstrate later at length with Senghor.
Many pages of the Cahier are in prose, however, and Cesaire does not
have so personal a poetic rhythm as Senghor. How is it, then, that we
immediately recognize his stamp?
Above all by the images, the first and principal quality of which is
the brutal expression of the poet’s desire and obsession. Cesaire’s
When his emotion is too sharp and he wishes to describe the still
nonexistent world of his desire, where we would be wordless because
ordinary vocabulary would prove insufficient, Cesaire finds the rare
words, invents neologisms, creates baffling associations. It is not
necessary to understand the meaning: The words are chosen for what
we may call their texture, for their sound. To pronounce them is
sufficient to make “palpable” the emotion that inspires them.
Those gluey pictures describing the West Indies result in the follow¬
ing text:
[Here the parade of ludicrous scrofulous bubos, the cultures of very strange
microbes, the poisons with no known antidotes, the pus of very ancient
wounds, the unpredictable fermentations of putrescible species.]
We share the author’s disgust at this mass of suffering and foul rot, at
the mere sound of these exceptional words—scrofulous, bubos, cul¬
tures, antidotes, pus—even if their exact meaning escapes us.
Further on, his exacerbated revolt seeks the destruction of this
“horizon of mud” (p. 79) projecting pictures of a world in a state of
disorderly fusion:
nous chantons des fleurs veneneuses
eclatant dans des prairies furibondes;
les ciels d’amour coupes d’embolie, les matins epileptiques; le
blanc embrasement des sables abyssaux, les descentes d’epaves dans
les nuits foudroyes d’odeurs fauves. [p. 53]
[And you phantoms rise chemically blue from a forest of hunted animals of
twisted machines of jujube trees of putrefied flesh of baskets of oysters of eyes
of a lacing of leather strips cut from the beautiful sisal of human skin I shall
have words vast enough to contain you]
[Grasses will wave for the cattle gentle vessels of hope the long alcoholic swell
of the sea.]
[There are your eyes, quivering swarm of ladybirds on a grey stone day]
[from the other side of the disaster I could hear a stream of doves and of
savannah clover which I always carry deep within me to the reverse height of
the twentieth story of the most insolent houses and as a precautionary measure
against the putrefying power of twilight atmosphere, surveyed day and night
by a sacred venereal sun.]
The disaster represents the past horrors of colonization; the stream,
as running water, brings purification that will permit a new life.25 Birds
and plants are always symbols of hope and untrammeled life. Savan¬
nahs and virgin forests indicate sources of freedom and authenticity,
in contrast to cities, tall buildings and the like—for Cesaire, synonyms
of European domination. Finally, twilight atmospheres and nocturnal
shadow accompany misfortune and despair. The sun and the stars, on
the other hand, represent the light of exultant joy; in the West Indian
night “the stars are more dead than a broken balafong’26 (p. 32),
whereas we see them participate, with the sun and the wind, in the final
apotheosis* (p. 91).
Together with the use of personal images, a second particularity of
Cesaire’s style is his syntax. To use Senghor’s expression, Cesaire is
“the magnificent master of his language.”27 He breaks it, mixes it,
forges and rebuilds it. His sentences often appear rough, knotty,
heavily laden. One could describe Cesaire’s poetry as “sculptured”; he
uses language as a substance carving shapes from it as if in wood or
stone. Without fear of subverting established grammatical usage, he
displaces adjectives, omits verbs to make his images more suggestive,
just as Picasso deforms objects in order to give them more truly the
shape of his own perceptions.
[Shortly after dawn, this most essential land returned to my greediness, not
tenderly diffuse, but the tormented sensuous concentration of these fat, teat¬
like hillocks with an accidental palm tree as their hardened offshoot. . . . ]
Au bout du petit matin, cette ville plate—etalee, trebuchee de son bon sens,
inerte, essouflee sous son fardeau geometrique de croix eternellement recom-
mengante, indocile a son sort, muette, contrariee de toutes fagons, incapable
de croitre selon le sue de cette terre, embarrassee, rognee, reduite, en rupture
de faune et de flore. [p. 27]
[This flat city shortly after dawn, exposed, stumbling commonsensically along,
inert, breathless beneath its geometric load of crosses eternally renewed,
intractable before its fate, mute, thwarted in every way, incapable of growing
according to the essence of this earth, cut down, encumbered, reduced, rup¬
tured from fauna and flora.]
* Translator’s note: With regard to Cesaire’s symbolism, see Mme Kesteloot’s study
of the poet in the Seghers “Poetes d’Aujourd’hui” series.
27. L. S. Senghor, Ethiopiques, p. 115.
190/THE NEGRITUDE POETS
One must not, however, imagine that Cesaire was incapable of being
classical. If he does violence to the French language to express an
extraordinary emotion, he also knows how to ply it with order and
harmony, to tighten his style into more regular lines:
voum rooh oh
pour que revienne le temps de pro¬
mission
et l’oiseau qui savait mon nom
et la femme qui avait mille noms
de fontaine de soleil et de pleurs
et ses cheveux d’alevin
et ses pas mes climats
et ses yeux mes saisons
et les jours sans nuisance
et les nuits sans offense
et les etoiles de confidence
et le vent de connivence, [p. 52]
[voom rooh oh
so that the pro¬
mised times return
and the bird who knew my name
and the woman with a thousand names
of fountain of fun and tears
Aime Cesaire: Cahier d'un retour au pays natal / 191
[He is King. . . .
he doesn’t have the title, but he surely is a king]
The Cahier was published almost in toto in 1939 in the journal Vo-
lontes, but went unnoticed by the Parisian public. A first bilingual
(French-Spanish) edition of the work appeared in 1944 in Cuba, and
was not published in full in France until 1947 in the Bordas edition,
prefaced by an article on Cesaire that Andre Breton had written in
33. Andre Breton, “Un grand poete noir,” Fontaine, no. 35 (1944). [Translator’s note:
A small and little known bilingual French and English edition of the Cahier (translated
by Ivan Goll and Lionel Abel as Memorandum on My Martinique) was published with the
Breton preface by Brentano’s in New York, also in 1947. The Cuban edition was illus¬
trated by Wifredo Lam.]
34. A. Breton, ‘‘Un grand poete noir.”
35. It is only during the last few years, that Pierre de Boisdeffre and Gaetan Picon,
two of the best French literary critics, have finally broken their silence.
Aime Cesaire: Cahier d'un retour au pays natal / 193
1. The details given in this introduction were obtained in the course of an interview
with L. S. Senghor in June 1959.
2. Chants d'ombre (Paris: Seuil, collection Pierres Vives, 1945). Hosties noires (ibid.,
1948). Both reissued as one vol. in 1956. We give the title of each poem, indicating the
collection to which it belongs by the letters CO or HN.
194
Leopold Senghor: Chants d 'ombre and Hosties nones / 195
[I lived there long ago, among the shepherds and the farmers ... I lived then
in this kingdom, saw with my eyes, with my ears heard the fabulous beings
beyond things; the ancestral spirits (the Kouss) in the tamarind trees; the
crocodiles, guardians of the springs; the seacows who spoke to me, initiating
me in turn to the truths of night and noon. It has therefore been enough for
me to name these things, the elements of my childhood universe, to prophesy
the City of tomorrow, which shall be born from the ashes of the ancient, which
is the poet’s mission.]
Senghor was rooted in this civilization which had survived the ancient
Mali empire, assimilating both Islam and Christianity without losing
any of its original traditions. His Africa was living, profuse, completely
unlike Cesaire’s (“Bambara ancestors,” his evocation of “the king of
Dahomey’s amazons”) or Damas’s (“till now I’ve kept the conical an-
cestral faith high among the rafters of my hut”), visions of a mother con¬
tinent reduced to ethnological reminiscence or disembodied symbols.
Senghor s return to his native land was thus accomplished without
any of the pain typical among the West Indians. His were only pleasant
memories of a coddled childhood in the bosom of a family which
formed a ‘‘large household, with its grooms, stablemen, shepherds,
servants, and artisans.”9
At nightfall, the house at Djilor was a veritable painting of biblical
opulence.
Je suis sur les marches de la demeure profonde obscurement.
Mes freres et mes soeurs serrent contre mon coeur leur chaleur nom-
breuse de poussins.
Je repose la tete sur les genoux de ma nourrice Nga, de Nga la
poetesse.
Ma tete bourdonnant au galop guerrier des dyoung-dyoungs, au
grand galop de mon sang de pur sang.
Ma tete melodieuse des chansons lointaines de Koumba POrpheline.
Au milieu de la cour, le ficus solitaire
Et devisent a son ombre lunaire les epouses de 1’Homme de leurs voix
graves et profondes comme leurs yeux et les fontaines nocturnes
de Fimla.
Et mon pere etendu sur des nattes paisibles, mais grand mais fort
mais beau
Homme du Royaume de Sine, tandis qu’alentour sur les koras voix
heroiques, les griots font danser leurs doigts de fougue
Tandis qu’au loin monte, houleuse de senteurs fortes et chaudes, la
rumeur classique de cent troupeaux.10
While from afar with a sense of warm strong smells the classic sound
of a hundred cattle rises.]
Two princesses of royal blood and their servants were able to escape
the massacre:
Et parmi elles, la mere de Sira-Badral, fondatrice de royaumes
Qui sera le sel des Sereres, qui seront le sei des peuples sales16
This historical past explains the moral values of that warrior and
pastoral people—sobriety, a sharp sense of honor, scorn of money but
love of the vital riches, children, and cattle:
. . . minces etaient les desirs de leur ventre.
Leur bouclier d’honneur ne les quittait jamais ni leur lance loyale
Ils n’amassaient pas de chiffons, pas meme de guinees a parer
leurs poupees.
Leurs troupeaux recouvraient leurs terres, telles leurs demeures
a l’ombre divine des ficus
11. “Que m’accompagnent koras et balafongs,” CO, p. 49. Certain ethnologists, es¬
pecially Frobenius, link African civilizations to those of ancient Egypt. See chap. 8 above.
12. Gongo Moussa: a prince of the Mandingo empire which covered the entire terri¬
tory of former French West Africa.
13. Dyali: a griot attached to a Lord. See chap. 2, note 12, above.
14. Almamy: a Sudanese chief. Fouta Djalon: a mountain range in Guinea, and an
ancient kingdom, conquered by the French in 1896, of which the capital was Timbe.
15. “Que m’accompagnent koras et balafongs,” CO, p. 46.
16. Ibid., p. 47.
198/THE NEGRITUDE POETS
Religious values give meaning to this universe and animate the cosmic
life. The ancients initiate the young to these “forests of symbols’’21
whose poetry Senghor feels extremely deeply. The following poem,
perhaps one of the most beautiful he has written, bears witness:
The poet, like every other African, learned nature’s language very
early and lived in close relationship to Ancestors, whom he held in
veneration;
Je m’allonge a terre a vos pieds, dans la poussiere de mes respects
A vos pieds, Ancetres presents. . . .24
22. Tann: flat ground covered over by the sea during spring tides.
23. “Que m’accompagnent . . . ,” CO, pp. 51-52.
24. “Le retour de l’enfant prodigue,” CO, p. 73.
200/THE NEGRITUDE POETS
He knew that the dead were not dead, that he himself was the “the
grandfather of his grandfather . . . his soul and his ancestry,”25 and he
kept preciously secret “in [his] most intimate vein” the name of his
totem, “My ancestor with the lightning-scarred, the stormy skin,”26 the
third name given at his initiation, which no African dares reveal for fear
of putting himself in the hands of an enemy. Senghor acquired this
knowledge during the long nights of Sine, nights which he evokes with
warm fervor:
Femme, allume la lampe au beurre clair, que causent autour les
Ancetres comme les parents, les enfants au lit.
Ecoutons la voix des Anciens d’Elissa. Comme nous exiles
Ils n’ont pas voulu mourir, que se perdit par les sables leur
torrent seminal.
Que j’ecoute, dans la case enfumee que visite un reflet d’ames
propices
Ma tete sur ton sein chaud comme un dang au sortir du feu et
fumant
Que je respire l’odeur de nos Morts, que je recueille et redise leur
voix vivante, que j’apprenne a
Vivre avant de descendre, au-dela du plongeur, dans les hautes
profondeurs du sommeil.27
The nearness of the dead in no way depreciates life. Senghor tastes its
fruits both as poet and artist. Chants d'ombre contains at least eight love
poems, of which the most famous glorifies “Black woman”:
Yes, Africa truly lives in Senghor’s poems! Yet he left it “for sixteen
years of wandering” through a Europe he learned to know firsthand
“in the narrow shadow of the Latin Muses,”30 before becoming “a
shepherd of blonde heads” at the lycee in Tours, and later in Paris:
“good civil servant . . . good colleague, elegant, polite . . . Old France,
But these too tangible memories make his exile seem more terrible and
intensify his homesickness:
Je me rappelle, je me rappelle . . .
Ma tete rythmant
Quelle marche lasse le long des jours d’Europe
ou parfois
Apparait un jazz orphelin qui sanglote sanglote
sanglote.36
[I remember, I remember . . .
My head in motion with
What weary pace the length of European days
where now and then
An orphan jazz appears sobbing sobbing
sobbing.]
Beneath his European clothes, Senghor felt like a foreigner. How far
he was from his own clothes, from his own customs! The reproach
Senghor puts on the lips of a Senegalese prince in his poem “Le
message” testifies to his ridiculous appearance as a man “assimilated
and uprooted”:
[Children with short memories, what did the koras sing to you?
You decline the rose, they tell me, and your ancestors the Gauls.
You are doctors of the Sorbonne, paunchy with diplomas
You collect pieces of paper
Your daughters they tell me paint their faces like whores
They wear their hair in chignons, go in for free love to elucidate the
race!
Are you happier? Some trumpet goes wa-wa-wa
And you weep there on the great holiday and family feasts.
Must the ancient epic story be unfurled for you?
Go to Mbissel and Fa’oy; say the rosary of the
sanctuaries that marked out the Great Way
Walk upon the royal road again and meditate upon
the way of cross and glory.
Your high priests will answer: Voices of the Blood!]
Yet Senghor’s stay in France was far from useless. First, it taught
him where his heart was; second, that the suffering of his race was
vast. As a child, Senghor had been so happy and docile by nature
that he had never criticized his teachers. In Paris, the contact with
French intellectuals and West Indians and Americans of his race
awakened his conscience. At the Lycee Louis-le-Grand, he was first
listed among the “talas,”38 but then he went through a violent cri¬
sis and became a socialist. It was then that he met Aime Cesaire,
whose rebellion had begun to smoulder while he was still in Mar¬
tinique. Along with Cesaire, Senghor questioned Western values to
such a point that for more than a year he lost his religious faith.39
All the themes of present-day negritude appear in Senghor’s work
from this moment on. First, the affirmation of his color! This is clearly
shown in the titles of his poems: Chants d'ombre (“Shadow songs,” or
“Songs of darkness”)—Hosties noires (“Black hosts” or “Black victims”)
—A Cappel de la race de Saba" (“At the call of the race of Saba”)—Masque
negre (“Negro mask”)—Femme noire (“Black woman”), etc. Second, the
feeling of solidarity with all oppressed peoples of the world. It has
been said that Senghor was moved by the poverty and misery of the
proletariat before becoming aware of the passion of his own race.
Certainly, however, one encounters his loyalty to his original culture
even in his first poem:
Mais je n’efface pas les pas de mes peres ni des peres de mes
peres dans ma tete ouverte a vents et pillards du Nord.
[Neither masters any more nor slaves nor knights nor griots of griots
Nothing but the smooth and virile camaraderie of battles
And may the son of the captive be my equal
the Moor and Targui, those congenital enemies, my companions.]
He denounced
Les mains blanches qui tirerent les coups de fusils qui croulerent
des empires
Les mains qui flagellerent les esclaves, qui vous flagellerent
Les mains blanches poudreuses qui vous giflerent, les mains peintes
poudrees qui m’ont gifle
Les mains sures qui m’ont livre a la solitude et a la haine
... les diplomates qui montrent leurs canines longues
Et qui demain troqueront la chair noire.46
Senghor learned all this and would not forget it, even if he did not wish
to “bring out his stock of hatred.”47 Too often he has been called the
man of conciliation. His words of peace (“Oh! do not say that I do not
“Mineurs des Asturies, mineur negre de Johannesburg, metallo de Krupp, dur paysan
de Castille, vigneron de Sicile, paria des Indes” [“Asturian miners, black miner of
Johannesburg, Krupp’s metalworker, hard Castillian peasant, Sicilian vine grower, In¬
dian untouchable’’].
Contrary to what Sartre thought (“Orphee noir,’’ pp. xl-xli), it would therefore seem
that socialism or communism had been a phase on the way toward the claim for specifi¬
cally Negro rights, rather than the reverse.
45. “Au Gouverneur Eboue,” HN, p. 118.
46. “Neige sur Paris, CO, p. 30.
47. Ibid.
Leopold Senghor: Chants d'ombre and Hosties noires / 207
And the Negro continued to do K.P. and latrine duty for the “great
pink children.” “Who else but the high born will do the lowly jobs?”
asks Senghor.56 But his witticism hides only thinly a pain and bitterness
he was not always able to contain:
L’Europe m’a broye comme le plat guerrier sous les pattes pachy-
dermes des tanks57
Dans la nuit nous avons crie notre detresse. Pas une voix n’a
repondu.
Les princes de l’Eglise se sont tus, les hommes d’Etat ont clame
la magnanimite des hyenes
«I1 s’agit bien du negre! II s’agit bien de l’homme! non! quand
il s’agit de l’Europe.))58
[. . . I shall tear the banana laughter from all the walls of France
Seigneur pardonne a ceux qui ont fait des Askia des maquisards,
de mes princes des adjudants
De mes domestiques des boys et de mes paysans des salaries,
de mon peuple un peuple de proletaires.
Car il faut bien que Tu pardonnes a ceux qui ont donne la chasse
a mes enfants comme a des elephants sauvages.
Et ils les ont dresses a coups de chicotte, et ils ont fait d’eux les
mains noires de ceux dont les mains etaient blanches.
Car il faut bien que Tu oublies ceux qui ont exporte dix millions
de mes fils dans les maladreries de leurs navires
Qui en ont supprime deux cents millions.
Et ils m’ont fait une vieillesse solitaire parmi les forets de mes
nuits et la savane de mes jours.
Seigneur la glace de mes yeux s’embue
Et voila que le serpent de la haine leve la tete dans mon coeur,
ce serpent que j’avais cru mort . . .
62. On a formal level, this is one of Senghor’s least good poems; Claudel’s influence
is too apparent, to the detriment of African feeling. The purpose, however, is noble, and
many of the lines are concise.
210/THE NEGRITUDE POETS
It was not that Senghor made peace with the West over the dead
bodies of his victimized race,64 but that war had revealed to him all the
horror of racism.65 The spectacle of French people in their turn
bruised and ravaged and struggling against oppression enabled him to
rise above his resentment and to recognize aspects of France he could
love—the faces of its suffering:
Benis ce peuple garrotte qui par deux fois sut liberer ses mains
et osa proclamer l’avenement des pauvres a la royaute
Benis ce peuple qui rompt ses liens, benis ce peuple aux abois
qui fait front a la meute boulimique des puissants et des
tortionnaires.67
64. To use Cesaire’s expression from the Cahier, p. 82: “I shall not make my peace
with the world upon your backs,” i.e. at your expense.
65. Interview with Senghor, June 1959. He feels that the barbarity of the European
war he lived through was so shocking that he can no longer bear anything which has the
semblance of racism.
66. ‘‘Priere de paix,” p. 152.
67. Ibid.
212/THE NEGRITUDE POETS
[Bless these captive people who twice have known how to liberate
their lands and dared proclaim the advent of the poor
to those of royal lineage
Bless these people who break their bonds, bless these people
reduced to their last extremity who confront the wild
greed of the powerful, the torturers.]
Senghor does not fail to warn African politicians that “cultural coloni¬
alism, in the form of assimilation, is the worst of all.”75 And if today
he declares himself in favor of mixed civilizations, this involves—to use
his own expression—“confrontation” and “symbiosis.” As in Hegelian
synthesis, the two contrary assertions—Negro values and Western val¬
ues—must purify each other, retaining only the best traits of each, in
order to achieve the harmonious amalgamation desired by Senghor.
Toi entre tous Elephant de Mbissel, qui parait d’amitie ton poete
dyali79
[How vast how empty the courtyard with the smell of nothingness
The golden note of the flute of silence leads me, the shepherd,
my long ago dream brother leads me
Mbaye Dyob! I want to speak your name and tell your worth
[O bless this people, Lord, who seek their own face beneath
the mask and scarcely recognize it]
Nous repeterons pour une fete fanee deja la danse autrefois des
moissons, danse legere des corps denses
At the hint of dawn, when in the choir the weaker voices of the maids
grow tender and tender the smile of the stars!
We shall move forward shoulder to shoulder,
bodies fervently quivering
Toward the resonant mouths and the praises and
the heavy fruits of the intimate tumult!]
It is also suitable for evoking the mystery that hovers over villages
haunted by the ancestors:
Enclos meridien du cote des tombes!
Et toi Fontaine de Kam-Dyame, quand a midi je buvais ton eau
mystique au creux de mes mains
Entoure de mes compagnons lisses et nus et pares des fleurs
de la brousse!
La flute du patre module la lenteur des troupeaux
Et quand sur son ombre elle se taisait, resonnait le tamtam
des tanns obsedes.95
But Senghor’s verse is better than any other at “singing a noble sub¬
ject”:
And like the white dromedary’s, may my lips for nine days at a time
be chaste of all terrestrial water, and silent.]
Voici que dec/ine /a /une /asse vers son lit de mer eta/e.98
[And now the weary moon sinks into her slack sea bed.]
Sometimes the echoes of two (or three) sounds call and answer one
another:
Ses paup teres comme le crepuscule rapide et ses yeux vastes qui
s’emplissent de nuit.
Out c’est bien Vaieule noire, la Claire aux yeux violets sous
ses paup teres de nutt.100
[Her eyelids like rapid twilight and her vast eyes filling
filling up with night.
Yes, it is she, the dark ancestor, Bright with violet eyes
beneath her lids of night.]
Most of the time, however, the device has no other aim but the
sensual. The author is attracted by the plastic qualities of certain con¬
sonants and repeats them, not in imitation of nature, but because they
stimulate or sustain his inner rhythm, even independently of the sub¬
ject matter involved.
The rhythm is not always the same. It can rise to the syncopated beat
of the American Negro jazz Senghor is so fond of:
Qui sera le set des Scrcres, qui seront le sel des peuples sales.107
[And when at its shadow she grew silent, the drums of the haunted
tanns were echoing.
Who will be the Serer salt, who will be the salt of the peoples who’ve
been soiled.]
will find them monotonous. Yet the monotony of Negro poets, Seng-
hor says, “is the seal of their negritude.”125
If rhythm is of such importance to the Negro poet, Senghor has
often repeated, it is because through his incantations it “permits access
to the truth of essential things: the forces of the Cosmos.”126
These forces, Africans believe, are propagated in the form of waves.
And Senghor added: “And, since contemporary physics has discov¬
ered the energy contained in matter, the waves and radiations, this is
no simple metaphor.”127 For modern physicists, too, the “world’s
substance is made up of rhythmic energy waves.”128 In Sudanese cos¬
mogonies, waves represent water, and water is life: They also repre¬
sent technique (the to-and-fro motion of the weaver’s shuttle) and speech,
which is also propagated in the form of waves. Waves thus represent
all the various manifestations of creative energy.
Rhythm enables the artist to participate in the vital cosmic forces
thus endowing him with creative power. The object created—be it
sculpture, painting, or poem—is a work of art only if this rhythm is
apparent. “To respond to and be in harmony with the rhythm of things
is the Negro’s greatest joy and happiness, his reason for living. In black
Africa, a work of art is a masterpiece and fully answers its purpose, only
if it is rhythmic.”129
And this is true not only of works of art, but also of dances, “to dance
is to create”;130 or of work: Negroes weave, sow, reap, always accom¬
panied by voices singing or the sound of the tom-tom. Not only to
encourage effort, but to make the work effective. This characteristic is
still so deeply rooted today—even when rapport with the cosmogony
is lost—that both the West Indian peasant and the African worker still
feel the need to sustain their effort with rhythmic songs.
It is also by means of this participation in world forces that rhythm
is an instrument of knowledge. Africans only know the Other, only
“penetrate” the Other, be it person or object, because they instinc¬
tively seize the waves emanating from it. Comparing Descartes to a
black African, Senghor would have the latter say: “I feel the Other, I
dance the Other, therefore I am.”131 He thus emphasizes the funda¬
mental difference between European logic, “analytic through use,”
[Set the bells in rhythmic motion, the tongues, the oars, the
dance of the master oarsmen.]
[Feed upon my strong man’s breast, the milky grass that gleams
upon my chest.]
[May twelve thousand stars be lit each night about the Main
Square.]
## HP
Rene MARAN
ATOUALA
Veritable Remin
f»*rx o<
,NCOUWT ’~1
L - G DAMAS
pigments
C A III I: R
m \
R HTOl'R
\i
PAYS NATAL
pm < r*U- par
ANDRL H R Lit) N
ttith irtu*xtcui**n» tty
ibt'l and it-an <.«>// 10. Title page of the 1947 bilingual
edition of Cahier d’un retour au pays natal.
(Photograph by Roy Lewis, reprinted by
B K £ N T A N O ■ S permission of the Moorland-Spingarn
Research Collection, Howard
University.)
11. Aime Cesaire and his wife Suzanne, July 25, 1959, on a street in Paris. (Courtesy of
Editions Seghers.)
12. Leopold Sedar Senghor, president of Senegal, listening to
Duke Ellington during the First Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar in
1966. (Photograph by Charlotte Kahler, reprinted by permission.)
PIERRES V
LEOPOLD SEDAN. SENGHOR
HOSTIES
14. Two future presidents, L. S. Senghor (second row, third from left) and
Georges Pompidou [first row, second from left) at the Lycee Louis-le-Grand in
Paris, 1931, with fellow students. (Courtesy of Editions Seghers.)
15. Alioune Diop, founder and editor of
Presence Africaine. (Courtesy of Service
Information de la Cote-d’Ivoire.)
i
SOMMAIRE
ANTX&E GIBB ........ Avanbpropos.
AXJOUNE DIOP.. Niam n'goura.
TEL MONOD ......... E tapes.
M. GRIAULE ......... L’inconnue noire.
J.-P. SARTRE ........ Presence noire.
P. MASSON-OL7RSEL L'Afrique participante,
G. BALANDIER ...... Le noir est un Homme.
EL MOUN1BR ........ Lettre 4 un ami africain.
P. NAYILLE ........ Presence africaine,
BLY DEN..... * * » ■* *.* + ■*. (Textes traduit® par P, Mer,
cier.)
J. HOWLETT Absence et presence.
CHRONIQUES
A1ME PATRI .... Le message philosophique et
poetique de Malcolm de
Chazal.
R. REMONTON .............. A prepos de quefques objets
d'art de TA. O. F.
HUGHES PANASSIB ........ Le mat blanc.
Mme et M. PEPPER ........ Musique et pensee africaines.
Dr PELAGE La fin Tun mythe sctentlftque.
16. Cover (left) and Contents page (above) from the first issue of Presence
Africaine, November-December 1947. (Reprinted by permission of Presence
Africaine.)
17. Frantz Fanon (1925-61), heir of the negritude generation and also
its critic in Black Skin, White Masks (1952). (Courtesy of Grove Press.)
18. Jacques Rabemananjara (b. 1913), Madagascan poet, essayist, and
politician. (Courtesy of Editions Seghers.)
19. From left to right, Richard Wright, L. S. Senghor, and three black American scholars,
John A. Davis, William H. Fontaine, and Horace Mann Bond, at the First Congress of Black
Writers and Artists, held in September 1956, at the Sorbonne in Paris. (Courtesy of
Editions Seghers.)
THE WAR YEARS
Extraliterary Activity and
Two Important Essays
229
230/THE WAR YEARS
2. L. S. Senghor, “Ce que l’homme noir apporte,” in L'homme de couleur (Paris: Plon,
1939).
3. Leon Damas, Re tour de Guyane (Paris: Librairie Jose Corti, 1938).
4. Cardinal Verdier, J. Leclercq, Dr. Price-Mars, L. S. Senghor, The Rev. Aupiais, and
others, L'Homme de couleur.
5. Cardinal Verdier, Introduction, ibid., p. xi.
6. R. P. Aupiais, Provincial of the African Missions in Lyon, ibid., p. 59.
Extraliterary Activity and Two Important Essays / 231
zation being born in Africa should develop under the aegis of France
and within the framework of its spirit.”7
These preliminary remarks are mentioned to show the attitude of
the best-intentioned Europeans of that period and to emphasize the
originality of Senghor’s study—and even his attitude. Without a single
reproach or hint even of what is said elsewhere in the work, in an
always courteous and refined tone, Senghor undertakes an apology for
African societies. He praises the black man whose personality “gives
the impression that he is easily assimilable, whereas he is the one who
assimilates,” and patiently he explains African institutions to Euro¬
pean readers: The blacks’ religion? Monotheism, cults of their Ances¬
tors, participation in cosmic forces, and moral values where love, char¬
ity, and the solidarity of the clan are preeminent. Sociopolitical
systems? Personal needs, “the original human needs of true liberty,
responsibility and dignity, find fulfillment in these systems;8 the work¬
ing of the soil, a noble task,9 allows a harmony of man and creation.”10
The chief s authority is based on spiritual preeminence and controlled
by nonrevocable ministers; the system of “palavers” permits peaceful
settlement of conflicts, and the equality of all the members of the
group is effective. Everywhere hospitality, respect for the stranger and
for one’s parents, flourishes.
Following this, Senghor attacks. He compares these so-called primi¬
tive societies to those of Western countries: governments in Europe
which are maintained thanks to the police, governments with no au¬
thority, subject to the hands of schemers or puppets. Men there feel
that they are becoming cogs in a machine and their work is alien and
painful.11 Growing individualism produces crises that become more
and more serious.12
He concludes with a eulogy of Negro art, detailing its characteristics
and contrasting it with classical Western art, to the detriment of the
latter.
All this is expressed with considerable tact, for Senghor is a born
diplomat, but nonetheless with perfect clarity. Your “black brother,”
he declares in answer to the other contributors, has no need of a
helping hand to “assist him in his ascent,” nor to be initiated “into all
the arts and sciences,” nor even to reach a “greater degree of physical,
The previous year, Leon Damas had published Retour de Guyane. Sent
as head of a mission to his native country by the Musee d’Ethnographie
de Paris,13 he returned with a detailed report enumerating the social
wounds due to colonization, and above all the curse of the penal
colony, which humiliated all Guianese abroad14 and corrupted society
in the country itself. European convicts, far from being kept apart from
social life there, Damas wrote, had considerable influence on it. They
were used as domestic help by the civil servants in the colony and,
when necessary, as technicians: masons, mechanics, chauffeurs, writ¬
ers, nurses. Furthermore, after he had served his sentence, a convict
was obliged to remain in Guiana for a period equal to that of his
sentence: “He becomes a tramp, terrorizes us, rapes our children,
imposes his customs and morals on our society, degrades, corrupts,
and debases it instinctively.”15 Because of the high incidence of rob¬
bery and other crimes, the people in Guiana lived in a perpetual state
of insecurity. Damas questioned what right France had to corrupt a
colony in this manner, reducing it to the level of a “cesspool” for the
protection of the mother country.
But he did not stop there. Apart from the presence of the convicts
Among the young elite, assimilation collides with a hostility masked for the
moment as indifference.19
And when the terms of the law include the necessary nuances—“a
wise and well understood assimilation in no way prevents considera¬
tion of circumstances and a variety of needs”—Damas lucidly com¬
ments:
Of course! It won’t whitewash miners or cane cutters; the “variety of needs’’
will continue, more than ever, to serve as an excuse for maintaining Guiana
as a septic tank for the mother country. See the guile of it, Guiana will be part
of the mother country. To whom will she complain after that, I ask you?
. . . Finally, this is only a new demagogy: to give it a title without worrying
about what remains.23
Retour de Guyane, too sincere for its time, was considered a political
pamphlet by French authorities.24 One can see how “negritude” in the
completely harmless to the colonizer. This article was part of a longer essay which
Damas never published.
25. Aime Cesaire later wrote a short essay, counterpart of the first two, entitled Discours
sur le colomahsme (Paris: Editions Reclame, 1950).
26. L. S. Senghor, letter of February 1960. Senghor therefore recognizes the direct
relationship between his group and Alioune Diop’s. The latter, as well as Paul Niger and
Jacques Rabemananjara, also confirm this fact. Since the founding of Presence Afncaine,
both Senghor and Cesaire have served as members of the board. (See part V below.)
Andre Breton arrived in Martinique in 1941, spending
his first week in the Lazaret concentration camp close to Fort-de-
France. This is how he describes his feelings and his discovery of the
magazine Tropiques:
Free at the end of a week, with what eagerness I plunged into the streets,
seeking what they offered me of the heretofore unseen, the splendor of the
markets, voices like hummingbirds, women whom Paul Eluard, returning from
a trip around the world, had described as more beautiful than any others.
Yet soon a paralysis became apparent, threatening once more to overcome
the scene. Nothing seemed to be holding this town together; it seemed bereft
of its vital organs. The commerce, all in shop windows, had a hypothetical,
uneasy air. Traffic was slower than it should have been, noises too distinct, as
if heard across a junkyard. In the fragile air there was the distant continuous
ringing of an alarm.
It was in these circumstances, as I was trying to buy a ribbon for my daugh¬
ter, that I happened to glance through a magazine displayed in a store. Be¬
tween its very modest covers, here was the first issue, just out in Fort-de-
France, of a new review called Tropiques. Knowing how far ideas had
degenerated here during the past year and having experienced the brutal
manners of the Martiniquan police, I glanced through it with great suspi¬
cion.
I could hardly believe my eyes. What was said was what had to be said, not
only as well, but as loudly as one could say it. The grimacing shadows faded;
all the lies and mockeries grew limp; the voice of mankind had not then been
cut off or silenced; it rose up again here like the very thrust of light. Aime
Cesaire was the name of the man who spoke.
In complete contrast to what had been published in France during the past
months, which bore the marks of masochism when it was not simply servile,
236
Vichy Martinique and Tropiques / 237
Tropiques was continuing to hollow out the royal road. “We,” proclaimed
Cesaire, “are among those who say no to darkness.”1
1. Andre Breton, Preface to Aime Cesaire’s Cahier d'un retour au pays natal. It appeared
as an article in the review Fontaine, no. 35 (1944), pp. 542fF.
238 / THE WAR YEARS
scattering. On the other hand, the reactions of the West Indian bour¬
geoisie, whose cultural subservience was being directly attacked, were
violent and led to a clever form of sabotage. It was not possible to
forbid the magazine officially, but under government pressure and out
of fear of becoming compromised, one after another the island s print¬
ers refused to print it. These intrigues, however, took time and for
three years, one way or another, the review managed to get published,
sowing the seeds of new ideas in the minds of its readers.
The young read Tropiques with passion, and from their generation
have come men like Frantz Fanon, Edouard Glissant, Joseph Zobel,
and, lastly, Georges Desportes, an old student of Cesaire’s who, faith¬
ful to his master’s spirit, founded the journal Caravelle in Martinique
in 1947. In addition, Tropiques established cultural contacts with neigh¬
boring countries like Cuba and Venezuela. Cesaire’s reputation spread
as far as Haiti, where in 1944 he was invited to deliver a series of
courses and lectures over a period of eight months. It was also in Haiti
in 1946 that Pierre Mabille founded an important cultural review Con-
jonctions, which took over from Tropiques not only the surrealist flag but
also its aims of cultural originality and the development of native
personality.
From the very first issue, with courageous lucidity, Tropiques placed
itself on a level that was both national and international. Martinique
was a derelict island: “No city. No art. No poetry,’’ as Cesaire put it.
Awareness of the mediocrity need not, however, lead to resignation,
but must stimulate the energy of those who no longer wish to be
universal parasites.
Silent and sterile land. I am speaking of our land. And across the Caribbean
my ears consider the terrifying silence of Man. Europe. Africa. Asia. I can hear
the shriek of steel, the sound of tom-toms in the jungle, the temple praying
amid the Banyan trees. And I know man is speaking. Again and always I listen.
But here there is monstrous atrophy of the voice, century-old prostration,
prodigious silence. No city. No art. No poetry. No civilization, true civilization.
I mean the projection of man upon the world, the shaping of the world by man:
a stamping of the universe with the likeness of man.
A death more horrible than death itself toward which the living are drifting.
Elsewhere science makes progress, new philosophies rise and aesthetics
change. Vainly in this land of ours does the hand sow grain.
No city. No art. No poetry. Not a seed, not a single young shoot. Or else
the hideous leprosy of imitations. Truly a mute and sterile land. . . .
But there is no longer time to be a parasite upon the world. Rather we must
save it. It is time to gird our loins like valiant men.
Wherever we look the darkness is winning. One after the other the fires are
going out. The circle of shadows is closing in upon the cries of men and the
howlings of wild beasts. And yet we are among those who say no to darkness.
We know that the salvation of the world also depends upon us. That the world
needs all and any of its sons. Even the most humble.
The darkness wins. . . .
—Ah! all hope is not too much to face the century with!
Men of good will will create a new light for the world.2
Right from the start, then, Tropiques assumed the task of describing
brutal reality and combating it. Some called it the optimism of youth,
and others thought it depressing pessimism. Yet it was simply manly
courage! Cesaire used to say then: “Everything is as bad as can be, so
it is time to call up the men of good will and say no.” Twenty years
later his appeal found an unexpected echo in the play by Ionesco in
which the hero, facing an army of rhinoceroses, cries out: “No, I shall
not capitulate!”
“What was said in Tropiques, ” Breton realized, “was what had to be
said.”
240
Cultural Sterility: Denial of the Self / 241
who are incapable of either great courage or great cowardice, you carry on
your forehead a fatal mark. . . . You lack resilience. . . . You have no char¬
acter . . .
You have no faith in yourself. You invariably take yourself for less than a
man since you say: “Not bad for a Martiniquan” when one of your brothers
occupies a minor official post. . . . The Martiniquan petty bourgeois is incapa¬
ble of writing fiction, for the simple reason that he himself is a fictitious
character.
A literature is taking shape here. Whether you like or not is the least of our
worries. Aware of what you are, by means of skillful geometrical projection we
shall show precisely what you are not upon the Caribbean screen. Martiniquan
poetry will be virile.7
Is there anyone who does not see that the denigration of this alien¬
ated society was so intense only because the editors and contributors
of Tropiques were so painfully both judge and plaintiff? It was in them¬
selves they found the alienation they were fighting: It was theirs be¬
cause of their education, their family ties.
On the other hand, their condemnations were not without appeal.
They were rejecting and shaking off old bonds, but in so doing wound¬
ing their parents, friends, and colleagues. That was why even their
most vehement criticisms were always accompanied by prayers and
appeals. They possessed a truth they were anxious to share, and were
convinced it was transmissible. Practically every controversial article
contained a note of hope: “There is still that small number of men, if
not of will, at least of‘good will,’ from whom we still hope to obtain
something.”9 Or else justifying questions: “Could we decently come
to the encounter with art holding the borrowed favors of a borrowed
poetry in our hands? Did we have to have the impudence to bring
copies whose originals would betray us?”10
Occasionally the poet sings softly to tame his ignorant and timid
brethren. He asks for their trust; he becomes their patient and clear¬
sighted guide:
7. Ibid.
8. Aime Cesaire, “Le grand midi,” in Les armes miraculeuses (Paris: NRF, Gallimard,
1946), p. 80.
9. R. Menil, “Laissez passer la poesie.”
10. R. Menil, “Naissance de notre art.”
244/THE WAR YEARS
Beneath the armor of wit and apparent obscurity, Cesaire was pre¬
dicting a young sky of hope, the newborn heaven of freedom.
11. Aime Cesaire, “En rupture de mer morte,” Tropiques, no. 3 (October 1941), p. 75.
Weapons: Africa and the Race
245
246/THE WAR YEARS
created for himself “an African soul, a way of thinking and feeling
properly African.”3
Wasn’t this enough to scandalize assimilated Martiniquans who
swore only by Europe? For what did this scientist discover after “nu¬
merous exploration trips, a detailed study of rupestral drawings
throughout the African continent and Europe, a comparison of reli¬
gions, morals, customs, habitat, tools, objects of current use, among
most peoples of this earth?”4 He discovered that the mysterious
Paideuma power had developed more slowly in Africa than elsewhere,
but deeply and with fewer changes, “giving birth in certain parts
of Africa to civilizations as brilliant as those of the Gao empire, at a
period when Europe was covered with impenetrable forests and
swamps.”
Frobenius’s Histone de la civilisation afncaine5 is a tremendous effort
of synthesis toward the understanding of all these very ancient forms
of civilization, which today seem primitive and frozen, whereas in
reality they were often the astonishingly rich and complex symbols of
grandiose cultures of which we know nothing.6
Black Martiniquans had no need, then, to be ashamed of their Afri¬
can origins. On the contrary, insofar as three centuries of slavery and
exile had cut them off from their origins, “those grandiose cultures of
which we know nothing,” it was urgent that they attempt a rediscovery.
“Africa does not only mean for us an enlargement toward somewhere
else, but also the deepening of our sense of self.”7
“The deepening sense of self’ is the phrase too that echoes from the
article by Rene Menil from which we have already quoted:8 “The tree
has access to the world not from outside but through its roots”—“One
penetrates the reality of man and things only as deeply as one pene¬
trates oneself’—“There is one path to reality outside of which one
misses everything. Whoever loses contact with himself, knows noth¬
ing.”
Here again the reasoning is simple: The Martiniquan, African in
origin, has lost his personality under the influence of Europe. To
rediscover himself as he was originally, he must rediscover Mother
Africa!
Suzanne Cesaire’s utilization of Frobenius had a definite aim. She
referred to the two forms of civilization which Frobenius believed he
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Tropiques reproduced in full the introduction to this work, of which we have given
several excerpts in chap. 8 above.
6. Suzanne Cesaire, “Leo Frobenius.”
7. Ibid.
8. Rene Menil, “Naissance de notre art, Tropiques, no. 1.
Weapons: Africa and the Race / 247
9. When asked about this, Michel Leiris replied that Frobenius’s theories are still too
vast for today’s ethnological science to adopt or refute. Today’s knowledge is insufficient
to dare form such theories regarding a little-known civilization.
10. Suzanne Cesaire, “Leo Frobenius.” It is unimportant that Frobenius’s classifica¬
tions are no longer considered valid by modern ethnologists. The important thing is that
they were fruitful for the Tropiques team.
11. Rene Hibran, “Le probleme de l’art a la Martinique,’’ Tropiques, no. 4 (October
1941).
12. We see here the germination of the myth of the “additional-African-soul,” which
the modern, too technical world needs—a myth which will later be nourished by the
writings of Alioune Diop, Senghor, and many others.
248/THE WAR YEARS
Indirectly through this poetry, Aime Cesaire evokes the black man’s
situation in the New World; this entire race condemned to “a sordid
reality”: plantation workers, vagabonds, prostitutes, “marching past
men, women, children, pell-mell, with the stubborn dust of poverty
and hunger clinging to their ankles.” What he sees, beyond the blues
and the Negro spirituals is the wait for the “coming of the Lord,”
compensation in eternity for a fate unbearable in this world.
“Ah, the Negro paradise! How clearly one feels it is the poetic
escape of a sad, bruised people, for centuries held in material poverty
and spiritual hell, in the custody of vigilant executioners!”15
“Grape jelly and golden biscuits” make up for the hunger that ac¬
companies the Negro throughout his life. The kindness of the saints
and prophets, the courtesy and politeness of Saint Michael and the
attentions ofjesus himself are compensation for all the brutalities here
on earth inflicted on the Negro, son of slaves.
But the new American Negro poets have stopped lamenting and
rebelled against their “vigilant executioners”:
And against the dark background of anguish, suppressed indignation, long
stifled despair, anger rises and whistles, and America, on the shaky bed of its
conservatism, is concerned about the dreadful hatred this cry is venting upon
them. . . . The black court of miracles has risen.
The black poet has no desire to paint or describe this pitiful humanity, but
is enlisted in the same adventure as his heroes. He lives their life. He does not
watch them struggle or fight, he himself takes part in the struggle and fight.
He is not above them but among them. He is not judge but comrade. And this
comradeship explains the astonishing ease with which the poet can put himself
in humanity’s place, his virtuosity at unraveling the skein of fundamental and
primary energies which motivate the people to whom he belongs.16
At the same time, Cesaire defines the role of the black poet. Spokes¬
man of his people, he need not choose as material “man’s noblest part,
the finest thoughts or feelings” but must “accept responsibility for
man’s entire nature” and paint earnestly and with passion so as to
“make a hero of the everyday Negro, despite an entire literature whose
mission is to ferret out all his grotesque and exotic aspects,” just “like
an African jeweler who has only brass and iron for his rarest master¬
pieces.” The Negro poet must be humble, he must also remain loyal
in spite of temptations: “How many opportunities for escape! . . .
civilization’s thousand exits called science, ethics, culture, which lead
to the ego’s surrender to appearances, for fear of the self.”17
The allusion here to the bourgeois and Westernized writers that
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid.
250/THE WAR YEARS
Tropiques habitually attacked was transparent. But this time the attack
was not merely negative: It pointed out the way or, better still, outlined
the mission. If the black poet has the courage to accept himself, his
color, and his social origins, to admit he is the racial brother of this
wretched mass, if he faces the fact that he must represent these people
and live their problems, then he can “call forth a world . . . accept a
new manner of suffering, dying, in a word, carry a man’s load.” Then
perhaps he will accomplish what all the virtuosity and talent of the
“alienated” poets has not succeeded in: He will awaken the primitive
energies, the psychological incentives which will enable this battered
race to rise and undertake the conquest of its liberty. “By a miracle of
love” he will succeed “in influencing even the innermost forces that
order destiny.”18
We can see how Cesaire led his readers from the study of Negro
literature to a more general view. The American Negro was but a
symbol of the entire black race, rejected, enslaved, humiliated because
it was black. And the Negro poet in the United States is authentic only
because he is willing to express his people’s defects. His poetry is valid
only to the extent that “it allows a drop of blood to show.” From then
on one must be deaf not to hear the call, fixed as if by a branding iron:
Writers of Martinique, you too are black, your people too are enslaved
and humiliated, do not shrink from yourselves and your responsibili¬
ties!
18. Ibid.
Weapons: Africa and the Race / 251
Drinking, eating, always the same incessant dream. Let us not smile at this
“naivete.” In a form at first childish, but nonetheless direct, these are valuable
historical documents. After searching through the archives, examining each
file, studying every paper left by the abolitionists, anyone who wants to grasp
the eloquent and pitiful destitution of our enslaved fathers must return to
these folktales.
And now the secret mechanism of the marvelous is revealed. When man,
crushed by a wicked, unjust society, looks around for help in vain, discouraged
and powerless, he projects his wretchedness and his revolt toward a sky full
of promises and dynamite.
After the cycle of hunger comes the cycle of fear. The slave’s master and his
companions, the whip and the stool pigeon. 1 his is the era when white and
black adventurers became experts in hunting escaped slaves.19
The time when bloodhounds combed gullies and mountains. The period
when informers were guaranteed their freedom. In other words, the time of
Fear, of the great Fear and universal suspicion.
This explains the strange and characteristic mythology of the Zombi. Every¬
thing is Zombi. Translate this into: “Be suspicious of everything; understand
that the whole of humanity, animals, and nature conspires against you.
A drum beats. The great voodoo laugh rolls down from the hills. In the
course of the centuries, how many revolts have begun this way? How many
fleeting victories! But also how many defeats! And what repressions! Hands
cut off, bodies broken on the rack, tortured, and the gallows; this is what fills
the byways of colonial history. Would nothing of this have seeped into the
folklore? . . .
And now, what remains? Hunger, Fear, Defeat. The great triangular circuit
and its monotonous slaves. What remains? Colibri, the valiant Colibri is
thoroughly dead. His drum no longer beats out the order to attack. . . . What
is left? . . . The Rabbit, the weak, but sly, crafty, wily—and unreliable rabbit.
The degeneration of the race. This is the great fact. Personal solutions replace
those of the group. Cunning replaces strength.
What is left? The foxy, crafty guys, the ones who can wangle things. From
then on, humanity is divided into two groups: those who know how to shift for
themselves, and those who don’t. The admirable result of two centuries of
civilization!
Once upon a time there was a black man clinging to a black land . . .20
19. “Negres marrons, ” runaway slaves, fled the plantation in order to live free in the
forests. They used to be hunted with specially trained dogs. If caught, the runaways
would be branded with a hot iron. A second escape attempt would be punished with
hamstringing, a third by death.
20. R. Mend and A. Cesaire, Introduction to special issue of Tropiques devoted to
Martiniquan folklore, no. 4 (January 1942).
252/THE WAR YEARS
253
254 /THE WAR YEARS
soul. Permitting the being to communicate with the world. A world. The poet’s
world.
Is nature then so clear? Its reality so understandable? The poet who has
stolen its creative fire, . . . will not he too need mystery and the indescribable?
Poetry is creation.1
These pages were written in the tone of those who do not deceive, confirm¬
ing that a man wholly engaged in his adventure at the same time had every
means at his disposal, not only on the aesthetic, but also on the moral and
social level, to make his mediation necessary and inevitable.
One became aware that every word that crossed his tongue, from the sim¬
plest to the most unusual, was naked. From this in his work that culmination
in the concrete, that constantly major quality of tone that so easily permits one
to distinguish great from lesser poets. What I learned that day was that the
verbal instrument had not even gone out of tune in the turmoil.7
4. As does, for example, Madame Eliane Bouquey in “Negritude et poetes noirs (thesis
for Licence es Lettres degree, at l’Universite Libre de Bruxelles, 1959).
5. Tropiques, no. 1 (April 1941), and no. 2 (July 1941).
6. See passage by Andre Breton, introducing chap. 15 above.
7. Andre Breton, “Un grand poete noir,” Fontaine, no. 35 (1944).
256/THE WAR YEARS
the emotional world to the point of upsetting it completely, that are typical of
authentic in contrast to false poetry. . . .
Cesaire’s poetry, like all great poetry and all great art, reaches the heights
by the power of transmutation it sets in motion, which consists—from a base
of the most disreputable subject matter, including even ugliness and servitude
—of producing what we know is no longer gold or the philosopher’s stone,
but liberty.8
8. Ibid. [Translator’s note: The Cahier had not been published in its entirety, though
portions had appeared in Volontes in 1939.]
9. Suzanne Cesaire, “1943: le surrealisme et nous,’’ Tropiques, no. 8 (October 1943).
Surrealist Poetry: Cesaire’s “Miraculous Weapon” / 257
We know where we stand here in Martinique. Our task as men was clearly
set out for us by the arrow of history: A society, corrupt at its very roots, relying
for the present on injustice and hypocrisy, fearful of the future because of its
guilty conscience, must morally, historically, and inevitably disappear.10
“Le grand midi” is a poem of rebellion and hatred. Against the stagnation
of a life of lies and prejudices. Against the stupidity, cowardice, surrender,
immorality of a debased world.11
[You
Oh you who stop up your ears. It is to you, for you that I speak, for you who
tomorrow will shred your browsing peaceful smiles until tears flow, for you,
who one morning will hoard my words up in your rucksack and while the
fearful children sleep will take the crooked path of flight and monsters.]
10. Ibid.
11. Aristide Maugee, “Un poete martiniquais, A. Cesaire,” Tropiques, no. 4.
12. Aime Cesaire, “En guise manifeste,” Tropiques, no. 8 (October 1943).
258/THE WAR YEARS
[The first person to have understood that poetry begins with excess, immod¬
eration, study of the forbidden, in the great blind drumming, the unbreathable
absolute vacuum, as far as the incomprehensible shower of stars.]
Breton:
Un poeme doit etre un debacle de l’intellect. . . . Apres la debacle tout
recommence—sable, chalumeaux oxydriques.
Eluard:
Sonnant les cloches du hasard a toute volee
17. Breton and Eluard quoted by Suzanne Cesaire, “Andre Breton, poete,” Tropiques,
no. 3 (October 1941).
18. Rene Menil, “L’action foudroyante,” Tropiques, no. 3 (October 1941).
19. Ibid.
260/THE war years
rated. What was left of it that was still pure and alive? A “tempera¬
ment” peculiar to blacks? This was really very little to base a culture
on! Even this temperament had been modified by crossbreeding,
Christianity, and middle-class education. To this throbbing nostalgia
for the past, however, surrealism brought a breath of hope. It would
open “the roads of yesterday and tomorrow and thereby renew . . .
forgotten ties. Bright clear roads where man, freed from the bonds of
time and space, might see clearly, clearly into a past which is at the same
time his future.”20
Speaking earlier of this “power . . . that removes the curses of an
impassable barrier between the outer and inner worlds,” Suzanne
Cesaire was thus referring not only to a Cartesian logic that was stifling
the treasures of the unconscious, but also to real barriers of time and
space (three centuries of exile and thousands of miles) which separate
the colored West Indian from his African past.
Surrealism appeared to West Indians, then, not only as a means of
exteriorizing their rebellion against the Western world, but also as the
only instrument available with which they could find themselves and,
from the depths of their separate unconscious, could attempt to bring
forth an apparently forgotten past. This was “an adventure which may
prove deadly, from all one can tell, but which one may hope—and that
is the essential—will lead to total spiritual victory.”21 Surrealism was the
only possible solution at the time for the cultural alienation of Martinique.
This was no gratuitous or experimental game, as it often was for
French surrealists. On the contrary, it was Orpheus with his torch in
search of Eurydice, according to Sartre’s famous comparison. In the
same manner, referring to Cesaire’s poem “Le grand midi,” Aristide
Maugee would speak of a descent into hell:22
The poet seeks a new world: a world of truth and beauty. Where will he find
it if not in the depths of his consciousness? It is at this moment that the fantastic “rise”
of this descent into one's self occurs. . . .
This search for knowledge through the tangle of earthly connections, amid
the seaweed of habits, instincts, inhibitions, the anxiety of impatience, is ex¬
traordinary.
In this search for spirituality, the poet’s desire is to break all shackles that
hold his consciousness in bondage. To plunge deeper and deeper in order,
like an exquisite rose, to welcome the supreme moment when man need no
longer compromise, lower himself, grovel, but on the contrary rise and grow
with the strength of his energy: “I grow like a plant. . . .” The thing is to await
the ecstasy that will make a bridge between the Communicable and the Incom¬
municable. What spiritual vengeance for the bitterness of humiliations and
rancor over tortured bodies!23
After being of use in the black poet’s rebellion, the liberation of his
personality, and the recovery of his past; after giving him the means
to act upon his people to free them in turn, would surrealism outgrow
its usefulness? Indeed not!
Tomorrow,
Through the angry clouds of world war, millions of black hands will spread
terror everywhere. Roused from a long torpor, this most deprived of all peo¬
ples will rise from the plains of ashes. . . .
Our surrealism will then produce the bread from its depths. . . . The power¬
ful magic of the rainmakers drawn from the very wellspring of life will be
recovered. Colonial asininities will be purified by the blue flame of autogenous
welding. The quality of our metal, the keen edge of our steel, our unusual
communions—all this will be recovered.30
laws, expressed in a spontaneous language. By analyzing this language, its rhythms and
its images, one might discover certain laws controlling the unconscious! Studies have
been made in this direction. Cesaire, for example became interested in the works of
Gaston Bachelard (L'eau et les reves [Paris: Editions J. Corti, 1942]) showing how each
of the four elements impose a certain number of images on the artist’s apparently free
imagination: There would thus be a kind of material objectivity in the poetic knowledge
of the world, as suggested by Georges Gusdorf in Mythe et metaphysique (Paris: Flamma-
rion, 1953, esp. pp. 209 ff.). L'histoire des religions by Mircea Eliade (Paris: Payot, 1959)
seems to confirm this hypothesis by showing the universality of certain symbols and even
occasionally their connection with identical economic and social forms, no matter the
time and the place. For example, all agricultural civilizations establish a relationship
between the creation of the world, the sexual act, and sowing. One may also note the
frequency of the sun cult in absolute monarchies or theocratic societies, whether they
be in ancient Egypt, among the Incas, in seventeenth-century Dahomey or twentieth-
century Japan.
These studies lead to the recognition that today “on the level of images there is one
irreducible substance which seems part of human reality”; and also that “if the reign of
material imagination has no scientific basis, it nonetheless has definite anthropological
meaning ... as a way of achieving humanity that surely corresponds to a certain form
of reality” (Gusdorf, pp. 210-11). This is how Cesaire understood the role of poetry and
poetic images. According to him, one must “give the image its true importance, greater
than the semantics of each word. One must not be put out by its arbitrary appearance.
Images are never arbitrary, that is to say without significance. I am not referring here to
comparison, but to the image which is the language of the unconscious and expresses it
by its own symbols and logic. A criticism too often made is that an image which is too
personal can prevent communication and close the poet in upon himself. One must not
forget the store of images in the collective unconscious. One must not forget that all,
or almost all, of them derive from primordial images—engrained in the collective uncon¬
scious—which are universal, as the language of dreams has demonstrated being identical
among all peoples, no matter what their language or conditions of life. The West has
for too long forgotten that images are the true universal language” (letter from A.
Cesaire, June 1959). If Cesaire has today left orthodox surrealist thought behind, this
recent text proves that he has kept one of its principal aspects.
30. Suzanne Cesaire, “Le surrealisme et nous.” One may note that the tone of the
articles in this issue is generally more aggressive. The contributors began to express
Surrealist Poetry: Cesaire’s “Miraculous Weapon” / 263
their thoughts clearly; they knew the review would not appear any more, since the
printers, under government pressure, were refusing to print it.
31. Regarding the educational role of the black writer, see chap. 21 below, as well as
the opinions of various writers who have been questioned on the subject, and which we
shall also take up in chap. 21. See also A. Cesaire’s speech at the Second Congress of
Black Writers and Artists (Rome 1959), published in the special issue of Presence Afncaine,
nos. 24-25 (February-May 1959).
32. Suzanne Cesaire, ‘‘Le surrealisme et nous.”
33. This interpretation of the poem has met with Aime Cesaire’s approval. We use
the version published in Tropiques, no. 1 (April 1941), pointing out the few differences
to the version published in Les armes miraculeuses (Paris: NRF, Gallimard, 1946), pp.
10-22, except where only the punctuation has been changed.
264 /THE WAR YEARS
The thoroughbreds in the sun are really men, thirsting for freedom.
They proclaim the revolution which will sweep away the stagnation of
established order. More powerful than reason, which counsels submis¬
sion to the law of he who is strongest, lucid, calculating madness can
split the scurvy bulk of beardless elders, namely all those who, though
still young, conduct themselves like resigned old men, accepting their
place, not finding the condition of Negroes intolerable.
The repetitive harmony of the first line (in the original French)
accumulates 5 sounds to give an impression of whistling speed, and
also ant sounds to evoke horses neighing. But the new note of the
second line immediately plunges us again into a world without air or
light. The pictures Cesaire paints—filthy heaps, rank smelling mists,
labored breathing, flossy hair—are contrasted with the unleashed pow¬
ers that will destroy them: ferocious warmth, shrieking madness, the
hard and lucid fissures of unreason.
Et j’entends l’eau qui monte
la nouvelle, l’intouchee, l’eternelle,
Surrealist Poetry: Cesaire’s “Miraculous Weapon” / 265
[And now
the nameless wandering
moves on
toward the sure necropolis
of the sunset
suns, rains, galaxies
fused in fraternal magma]
s’eteignit
vide
vide comme au jour d’avant lejour . . .
—Grace! grace!
Qu' est-ce qui crie grace?
Poings avortes, amassements taciturnes, jeunes
hurrah pour le depart lyrique
brulantes metamorphoses
dispenses foudroyantes
266/THE WAR YEARS
dies out
empty
empty as the day before the day . . .
—Mercy! mercy!
What cries out for mercy?
Abortive fists, taciturn piles, fastings
Hurrah for the lyrical departure
the burning metamorphoses
the lightning dispensations]
With the disappearance of all light, the world dies and is surrend¬
ered to the purifying properties of water. Emptiness and silence. The
sea, a necklace to the earth—Martinique is an island—promises un¬
known life, whose overflow, “mute ripenings of chasms,” permits a
better sounding of the depths. Yet all life is not extinct: The poet hears
cries for mercy that unleash his anger. He calls upon all those whose
rebellions were quelled and whose resentment has silently increased
to break loose; all dispensations will be granted them.
feu, 6 feu
les volcans tirent a bout portant
les villes par terre dans un grand bruit d’idoles
dans le vent mauvais des prostitutions
et des sodomies
les villes par terre et le vent soufflant
parmi l’eclatement fangeux de leur chair
le rugissement excrementiel34
34. In the NRF, Gallimard edition, this text was replaced by the following, p. 11:
feu 6 feu
eclair des neiges absolues
cavalerie de steppe chimique
retire de mer a la maree d’ibis
le semaphore aneanti
sonne aux amygdales du cocotier
et vingt mille baleines soufflant
a travers l’eventail liquide
un lamantin nubile mache la braise des orients
Surrealist Poetry: Cesaire’s “Miraculous Weapon” / 267
[fire, oh fire
volcanoes shoot point blank at cities
bringing them to earth with a great crashing of idols
in the evil wind of sodomies
and prostitutions
cities hit the earth and the wind
among the filthy burstings of their flesh
blowing its excremental roar]
[fire, oh fire
lightning of absolute snows
cavalry of chemical steppes
taken from the sea at the Ibis tide
the humbled Semaphore
vibrates in the tonsils of the coconut palm
and twenty thousand whales blowing
across the liquid fan
a nubile seacow chews upon the embers of the east]
268/THE WAR YEARS
that would at long last cleanse the bottom of this volcano (Martinique)
still eaten away by the termites of resignation, subservience and aliena¬
tion.
But faced with the enormity of his task, what a feeling of solitude and
weakness he has! The task is a crushing one, and he wishes he might
never again see or hear this real world, wishes he were rid of his
mission as purifier. But another interpretation of this passage does not
exclude the first: Cesaire feels robbed of his own personality here.
Outwardly he had rid himself of this alienating world, but he had borne
it for so long that the old Negro attitudes are stuck to him like glue,
saturating his retina, his ears, hindering his creation of the new world
he desires.
[Man!
But this beginning makes me less than man!
270/THE war years
Has this “nothing but a man” become discouraged? But the deper¬
sonalized Negro is no longer even a man! There is a moment of
confusion, of disgust with the self, in the face of things perceived as
foreign, hostile. (Here we recall the famous passage in Sartre’s novel,
La nausee, when Roquentin contemplates a root in the park.)
Homme!
Et voici l’assourdissement violent
qu’officie ma memoire terrestre,
mon desir frappe aux etats simples
je reve d’un bee etourdi d’hibiscus
et de vierges sentences violettes
s’alourdissant aux lezards avaleurs
du soleil
l’heure bat comme un remords
la neige d’un soleil
aux caroncules creve la patte levee
le monde . . .
[Man!
And here is the violent deafening
my earthly memory officiates at,
my desire strikes at simple things
I dream of beaks stunned by hibiscus
and purple virgin judgments
growing heavy with sun-swallowing lizards
the hour strikes like remorse
the snow of a wattled sun
bursts that raised paw
the world . . . ]
To escape from this discouragement, this doubt, before a world he
must resuscitate, the poet “deafens” his earthly memory; in other
words, he forgets the things he has learned and knocks at the gates of
the Unconscious. At first it is a sort of formless raving, a profusion of
images where red (hibiscus, wattles) and purple dominate, colors that
dazzle the eyes when one looks directly at the sun.
Ca y est. Atteint. Comme frappe
la mort brutale . . .
d’obscurs devenirs;
les habitudes font a la vase liquide
de trainantes algues—mauvaisement,
des fleurs eclatent.
Floe!
On enfonce, on enfonce comme dans
une musique.
The poet has found the door that gives access to the depths of his
soul. Walking slow-motion as if he were floating through fog, as the
languid style suggests, he attempts the descent into his self, despite the
resistant glue of habit.
Radiolaires,35
Nous derivons a travers votre sacrifice
Refoulements enfouis! desirs, desirs
Processionels desirs . . ,36
[Radiolarias.
We drift through your sacrifice
Buried inhibitions! desires, desires
Processional desires . . . ]
35. Radiolana: aquatic protozoa, the protoplasm of which send out radiating pseudo¬
pods (Larousse dictionary).
36. These last two verses are missing in the Gallimard edition.
272 /THE WAR YEARS
Ah
Le dernier des derniers soleils tombe
Ou se couchera-t-il sinon en Moi?
A mesure que se mourait toute chose,
je me suis, je me suis elargi37
37. In the Gallimard edition: “Je me suis, je me suis elargi—comme le monde” (“I,
I grew and stretched forth—like the world”).
Surrealist Poetry: Cesaire’s “Miraculous Weapon” / 273
[At last
this flat wind, happiness,
silence
Ah!
the last of the last suns is falling
Where will it set if not in me?
As gradually all things died
I, I grew and stretched forth
and my awareness larger than the sea!
The last sun
I burst. I am the fire, I am the sea. The
world is breaking up. But I am the world!]
Was this the end of everything, death? No, it was the unveiling of
the true self in contact with deep sources and the spontaneous germi¬
nation of new desires, new “senses” which earthly life until how had
274/THE WAR YEARS
atrophied. The poet thus reaches the very beginning of creation, which
will permit him to transform the world. The two final lines with the
repetition of r and ant sounds (in the original French), suggest the
centrifugal vortex of molten, vital energy that flows from the crucible
of the cosmos.
La serenite decoupe fattente en prodigieux
cactus.
Tout le possible sous la main.
Rien d’exclu.
Le monde veritablement pour la premiere
fois total.38
38. These last two lines are missing in the Gallimard edition.
39. This last verse is missing in the Gallimard edition.
Surrealist Poetry: Cesaire’s “Miraculous Weapon” / 275
I grow
glimmers of swamps, of shame, of acquiescence
in my eyes
—not a puff of air at the articulations
of my members—
on the age-old thorns
I grow like a plant
remorseless and without warping
toward the unfettered hours of day
pure and sure as a plant
without crucifixion
toward the unfettered hours of night!
The end!
My feet follow the verminous path
Plant!
my woody members contain strange sap
Plant! Plant!
The ancient spirit of the earth is dying . . .]
40. This recalls Frobenius’s theories on the plant-man. See chap. 17 above.
41. According to Senghor’s idea, which is close to Cesaire’s, it is sufficient to “name
things ... to prophesy the City of tomorrow which will be born from the ashes of the
ancient city, that is the poet’s mission’’ (Ethiopiques, p. 111).
276/THE WAR YEARS
[And I speak,
and my word is peace
I speak and my word is earth
I speak
and Joy
bursts in the new sun!
and I say:
time slips through the clever grass
branches foraged for a green-flamed peace
and the Earth breathed beneath gauze-like mists.
And the Earth stretched. There was a cracking
of its knotted shoulders. A fiery sparkling
in its veins.
Its sleep peeled off like August guava trees
on virgin islands athirst for light
And Earth crouched in its hair of
running water
with stars waiting deep within its eyes . . .
1. Conversation with Paul Niger in March 1959. (Paul Niger is the pseudonym of
Andre Albert Beville.)
2. Paul Niger, “Je n’aime pas I’Afrique,” 1944, in Anthologie de la nouvelle poesie negre et
malgache de langue jranqaise, ed. L. S. Senghor, p. 9.
279
280/AN END TO COLONIZATION
other scholars who study man in a glass case. They had injected this
social-scientific Negro with formaldehyde and claimed he was the new
specimen of fortunate man.”3
If Paul Niger was a bit unfair about the social scientist’s valuable
work, he was right on one essential point: All of Africa s past, no matter
how glorious it may have been, could not solve its contemporary prob¬
lems. Africa was no longer living at the time of the Askias and well-
organized clans, but in a colonial society. The world around Africa had
changed too. A liberated Africa was certainly not going to return to
its primitive state, but was going to play a constructive role in the
modern world. Paul Niger, who had been a colonial administrator,
knew that technology was the instrument of European power, whether
its expression was gunpowder, electricity, or machinery, and that lack
of technology was the weakness of underdeveloped countries, a weak¬
ness which permitted their colonization. Efe therefore advised immedi¬
ate commitment to those concrete transformations which alone would
make African countries capable of playing the role they aspired to.
Paul Niger’s friends had parallel experiences. For all of them negn-
tude led to action. Senghor was elected a deputy from Senegal to the
French assembly, and as early as 1947 he had established contact with
Kwame Nkrumah, to whom Ghana owes its independence. When
Jacques Rabemananjara returned to Madagascar, he too was elected by
his people and actively participated in the island’s revolt.4 Apithy be¬
came a minister in Dahomey. African intellectuals were not the only
ones to turn so clearly to politics. Cesaire was elected deputy from
Martinique, and Leon Damas soon became a deputy from French
Guiana.
Alioune Diop was also, for a while, senator from Senegal, but his
true bent was for more purely intellectual activity. While still a senator,
he created the magazine Presence Africaine, an idea that gave him the
reputation of being something of a dreamer. As soon as he had com¬
pleted his term, Diop devoted all his time and energy to the new
review.
The first issue of Presence Afncaine appeared simultaneously in Dakar
and Paris in December 1947. It soon became the principal voice of the
black world in France, and today its influence extends to the whole of
Africa. Among its sponsors were such important French intellectuals
as Gide, Sartre, Mounier, Maydieu, and Albert Camus, as well as the
ethnologists Paul Rivet, Theodore Monod, Michel Leins, and Georges
Balandier, and Anally four black writers of considerable fame: Senghor
and Cesaire, of course, the American Richard Wright, and the Daho-
mean Paul Hazoume.5
If the names adorning this young review formed a prestigious group,
the review’s very simple appearance testified to its financial indepen¬
dence. Presence Afncaine had nothing in common with the luxurious
colonial magazines, flattering mirrors of the mother country’s benevo¬
lence toward her overseas children. The poor quality of the postwar
paper on which Presence Afncaine was printed, the irregularity of its
publication, the numerous typographical errors sprinkled throughout
its pages—all these were indications of the financial difficulties Alioune
Diop had to cope with, sometimes in extremis through desperate ap¬
peals for funds. African solidarity came to the rescue every time to save
the work of this brother who had created so thought-provoking a
publication for his brethren, this rostrum from which thinkers and
writers, political men and sociologists, traditional wise men and uni¬
versity students attempted to “define the originality of Africa and
hasten its inclusion in the modern world.”6
This, in fact, is how Alioune Diop defined the objectives of Presence
Afncaine, specifying that the review would not owe allegiance to any
philosophical or political ideology. The “African originality” it had in
mind was cultural in nature and was to be demonstrated in the review
by means of literary work by Africans and studies of black civilizations.
Diop pointed to the magazine’s source in the group that had formed
around Senghor:
But Alioune Diop differed from his predecessors. Whereas they had
been preoccupied with the West Indies, he turned attention toward
black Africa, seeing more and more clearly the shortcomings of Afri¬
cans driven to follow the road forced upon them by history.
The tone in which he set forth his ambitions for the review was
surprisingly moderate, in contrast to that of the white contributors.
Diop emphasized the qualities of individual conscience and austere
will that had enabled Europe to take the lead in progress. The black
man, he recognized, is often content to enjoy the fruits of the present
in a universe of endless marvels; he cares little for knowing and taming
the world.8 And yet, today, he no longer has a choice: “The develop¬
ment of a modern world allows no person nor any natural civilization
to escape its grasp. . . . We are henceforth committed to an heroic
phase of history... . We Africans need to acquire a taste for elaborating
ideas and evolving a technology.”9
Diop denounced the black African’s individuality and his technical
weakness. But his article treats the subject with almost exaggerated
politeness and modesty. Diop not only stressed European qualities
Africans urgently need acquire, but he seemed to place the world’s
future in the hands of Europe, “creator of the leaven of all future
civilizations,”10 adding that “it is important . . . certain deprived peo¬
ples should receive from Europe, from France especially, the necessary
tools to construct this future edifice.”11 Presented as a combination of
“ethical resources . . . which constitute the substance to be fertilized
by Europe,” the possible contribution of Africa is hardly overesti¬
mated. “Fenced in for centuries by a kind of cosmic silence—useless,
in the eyes of many, to the world’s evolution—reduced, according to
these same persons, to a vain and bestial vitality—black peoples never¬
theless continue to live according to their wisdom and a vision of life
not lacking in originality. A new sensibility, a long and singular history,
have endowed it with an experience which in many ways it would be
profitable to make known. . . . Would it be rash to add that this
experience might even enrich European civilization?”12
Is it possible that at this period Alioune Diop may have been a bit
obsequious? In that case, he has certainly changed! What a difference
of tone in the following lines, which he wrote as a preface to Aime
Cesaire’s Lettre a Maurice Thorez:13 “Cesaire’s decision concerns us all:
14. Virulence which was itself exceeded by the biting irony of the texts in Revue des
Revues, a section at the end of the volume. In smaller print, beneath a mild title, these
are the pages which most clearly show the confident and militant spirit of the magazine’s
editors.
15. Rudyard Kipling.
16. Alioune Diop, “Niam n’goura,” p. 9.
17. Ibid., p. 11.
18. Ibid., p. 8.
19. Ibid., p. 12.
284/AN END TO COLONIZATION
20. In chap. 15 above we showed how the review Tropiques was “sabotaged by the
French government in 1943.
21. Alioune Diop, “Niam n’goura,” p. 13.
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid., p. 14.
24. Aime Cesaire, Cahier d'un retour au pays natal, p. 85.
In Paris: Founding Presence Afncaine / 285
25. At least in Europe and in French-language colonies. The readers of the Haitian
reviews published since the independence of this island are all within West Indian
territory.
26. Richard Wright, “Claire etoile du matin” (a French translation of his short story,
“Bright and Morning Star,” from Uncle Tom's Children), Presence Africaine, no. 1, pp.
120-35.
27. Abdoulaye Sadji, excerpt from the novel Nim, in ibid., pp. 89-110.
28. Andre Gide, “Avant-propos,” ibid., pp. 3-6.
29. Theodore Monod, “Etapes,” ibid., pp. 15-20.
30. Marcel Griaule, “L’inconnue noire,” ibid., pp. 21-27.
286/AN END TO COLONIZATION
one think of the slow progress of the species,” the author remarks,
page 32). In brief, rapid pictures, Balandier then describes life in
African villages and the mentality of the inhabitants as he had viewed
them, similar in many ways to those of French peasants.31 After these
articles denouncing Western moral prejudices, there were others em¬
phasizing social prejudices.
Pierre Naville accomplished the latter with considerable tact: “Edu¬
cation, culture, the various forms of artistic life, all these are just vain
words, if one does not possess the indispensable foundation: an eco¬
nomic and social life from which slavery, bondage, servitude, and
exploitation have been banned. It is obvious therefore that it is not
possible to separate intellectual culture from its social conditions.”32
Jean-Paul Sartre’s contribution went more brutally to the heart of
the subject. “We are ignorant,” he declared, “of the real condition of
black people in Africa, and this permits us to have a clear conscience.
Each time we shake hands with a black person here, we erase all the
violence we have committed there. ” Here we treat the blacks as foreign¬
ers, there as “natives” with whom it is shameful to fraternize. Sartre
hoped ‘'Presence Afncaine would paint an impartial picture of the situa¬
tion of black peoples in the Congo and Senegal. . . . This need not be
done with anger or revolt, only with the truth. It will be enough for
us to feel the scorching breath of Africa in our faces, the sour smell
of poverty and oppression.”33
Emmanuel Mourner’s “Lettre a un ami africain” was written in a
somewhat different tone. It “opens a dialogue ... on the grounds of
lucidity rather than on ceremony,”34 and speaks of the dangers which
threaten the young African movement, what Mounier calls its “child¬
hood illnesses,” doubtless inspired by Lenin.35
288
The Nature and Influence of Presence Afncaine / 289
The editors of Presence Africaine seemed thus to agree with the posi¬
tion of Legitime Defense that politics come first. Was this a retreat com¬
pared to the stand taken by L'Etudiant Noir, or was the latter mistaken
in insisting on the priority of culture?
We would like to point out, along with Senghor,8 that Legitime De¬
fense's demands were purely social and only called for the emancipa¬
tion of the West Indian working class. It did not yet challenge French
domination in the Islands. If the European values taught the natives
were criticized, this was only in the name of surrealism and commu¬
nism, values more modern but nonetheless still European. It was to
spare West Indians the apprenticeship of a culture already outdated in
the mother country, but not to assert the existence of Negro values as
such. This was understandable for West Indians, so long cut off from
their origins, incapable of imagining that these origins might be com¬
parable in prestige to French culture. In earlier chapters, we have seen
how deep cultural alienation was in the West Indies. Legitime Defense did
not in fact demand political emancipation but demanded only that
West Indians be completely integrated and henceforth considered
“completely French.” The resemblance to positions taken by Presence
Afncaine is therefore only apparent, due to the use of the word “politi¬
cal,” which should be interpreted in two different ways. For Legitime
Defense it meant internal politics, the struggle between opposing social
classes. For Presence Afncaine it meant external politics, a struggle be¬
tween nations of different culture.
Legitime Defense's demands, however, already implied the recognition
of the Negro as equal to the white man and the denunciation of racism,
segregation, and the oppression of the black proletariat. On the other
hand, if Legitime Defense did not strongly emphasize black culture, it
nevertheless demanded that West Indians rid themselves of servile
imitation and that they be allowed to express their originality within
French culture. This implied a spiritual difference that was interesting
to reveal. Presence Afncaine did not reject the positions taken by Legitime
Defense but extended and deepened a movement already outlined by
its predecessors.
L'Etudiant Non first insisted on cultural independence, apparently
influenced most of all by the Africans,9 who were closer to their black
origins and still saturated with traditions whose value they knew. In the
introduction to the magazine’s first issue, Diop noted that the first act
of these African students had been to take inventory of their assets and
weigh their differences. Gradually their criticism of a Europe that was
10. We include Leon Damas among the West Indians because he finished his lycee
studies in Martinique (in Cesaire’s class), and because in France he naturally felt closer
to the West Indians than to the Africans. In reality, French Guiana is not part of the West
Indies, and this is important on two counts: The Guianese do not suffer from insular
psychological conditioning; but they do suffer from the presence of the penal colony in
Cayenne and the prejudice it causes them abroad.
11. L. S. Senghor, Elements constructifs dune civilisation d'inspiration negro-afncaine, p. 279.
12. J. S. Alexis on Dr. Jean Price-Mars during the discussions of the First Congress
of Black Writers and Artists, a report of which appeared in the special issue of Presence
Afncaine, p. 69.
292/AN END TO COLONIZATION
13. In chap. 21 below we shall give more detailed information on the orientation of
a number of black writers.
14. Alioune Diop, see note 4 above.
The Nature and Influence of Presence Africaine / 293
There were two aspects of his national reality that a writer had to
reveal, synthetized by Edouard Glissant as,
on the one hand, what can be called the essential qualities of this reality, and
on the other hand, a basic demand rising from the present condition of black
peoples throughout the world. In order that the relationship between the
Negro novel and Negro reality may be total, the novelist must not sacrifice
these basic attributes to his demands, nor should he pursue an abstract expres¬
sion of these qualities, but he must recognize the demands as the real, al¬
though probably temporary, foundations of his art.15
15. Edouard Glissant, “Le romancier noir et son peuple,” Presence Africaine, no. 16
(October-November 1957), p. 26.
16. Jacques Rabemananjara, “Le poete noir et son peuple,’’ Presence Afncaine, no. 16,
pp. 12-13.
17. Quoted by Rabemananjara, ibid., p. 14.
The Nature and Influence of Presence Africaine / 295
This exchange of ideas within Presence Africaine bore fruit at the two
international congresses, where the majority of black writers agreed on
a precise and exact definition of their responsibilities.19
Alioune Diop’s activities rapidly extended far beyond the limits of
the magazine: He founded the “Editions de Presence Africaine,”
which published its first book, La philosophie bantoue by R. P. Tempels,20
in the first six months of 1949. This was a reissue of a book published
in 1945 by the Editions Lovanie in Elizabethville, whose distribution
had been hindered by the local clergy. Diop had found a copy of it in
Leopoldville in 1947. Since 1949, the Editions de Presence Africaine
has published poetry, novels, literary criticism, commemorative biog¬
raphies, as well as social, scientific, historical, and political studies.21
Before closing this chapter, we shall briefly consider the scope and
influence of Presence Africaine. In France, where all black students know
the magazine, there is no question they either criticize or appreciate
it. It has caught on in the West Indies, Haiti, Morocco, Madagascar,
and countries around France. In Africa it is read chiefly by university
students in Senegal, but during the last few years it has made its way
into Guinea, the Ivory Coast, Cameroon, Togo, and the former Bel¬
gian Congo.
Alioune Diop admits, however, that his magazine is little read in
Africa for several reasons. Its language and intellectual level make it
At the end of World War II the new African Negro literature made
great strides. Bois d’ebene by Jacques Roumain—who had just died—
was published in 1945 and met with immediate success among black
students. The themes, strength, and sincerity of this Haitian poet
coincided so perfectly with the Paris movement that Jacques Roumain
was immediately considered one of the leaders of negritude, though
in his lifetime he had never been a member of any of its groups, since
his diplomatic career had kept him far from metropolitan France. In
1946, Les armes miraculeuses by Aime Cesaire was published. Many ex¬
cerpts had already appeared in the review Tropiques. The collection was
enriched by a major work, Et les chiens se taisaient, Cesaire’s only tragedy
until then, presenting the Rebel, typical hero of every revolution.23
Also in 1946, with Diab'la, the Martiniquan Joseph Zobel began a
series of novels describing black peasant life. A little later Jacques
22. Sekou Toure, Le leader politique considere comme le representant d'une culture, message
given at the Second Congress, p. 105.
23. Cesaire is at present preparing another tragedy, Le roi Chnstophe, Negro king at
the beginning of Haiti’s independence. [Translator’s note: La tragedie du roi Chnstophe
(Paris: Presence Africaine, 1963); translated by Ralph Manheim, The Tragedy of King
Chnstophe (New York: Grove, 1970).]
The Nature and Influence of Presence Afncaine / 297
298
Black French-Language Writers in 1960: A Survey / 299
2. The questionnaire which we give below was corrected by Mme Dorsinfang and M.
Vauthier, professors at the Universite Libre de Bruxelles, and completed by Professor
G. Balandier, the specialist in African literatures.
3. Richard Wright’s dedication to White Man, Listen!
4. We were not able to speak at length either to Alioune Diop or Cheik Anta Diop,
but we were able to complete their replies by referring to their writings and lectures.
Using the same method, we “interviewed” three other young writers: Paulin Joachim,
Elolongue Epanya Yondo, and Olympe Bhely-Quenum. They are not included in our
data, but were taken into account in our analysis.
300/AN END TO COLONIZATION
If so, does such a black literature already exist? (Who are its
authors and most representative works?)
Or is this literature now being created? (What signs do you see
that point to this: books, authors, movements, etc.?)
We can divide the authors interviewed into two groups: In 1960, the
year of our questionnaire, thirteen were over thirty-five and nine were
under that age. This is no arbitrary separation, since our investigation
showed that there are differences between the two generations, which
will be clear as we continue.
Nine of the writers we questioned were born in the West Indies:
Aime Cesaire, Leon Damas, Frantz Fanon, Edouard Glissant, Gilbert
Gratiant, Rene Maran, Paul Niger, Leonard Sainville, and Joseph Zo-
bel. Only Glissant and Fanon, at the time, were under thirty-five.
Eleven writers were African: F. Agblemagnon, Hampate Ba, Mongo
Beti, Bernard Dadie, Alioune Diop, Cheik Anta Diop, David Diop,
Ousmane Sembene, Leopold Sedar Senghor, Felix Tchicaya U Tam’si,
and A. Tevoedjre. Of these, four (Dadie, Alioune Diop, Hampate Ba,
and Senghor) were over thirty-five, as were the two writers from
Madagascar, Rabemananjara and Ranaivo.
Among the West Indians, all of them descendants of Negro slaves
from Africa (although of mixed blood to a greater or lesser degree),
six are from Martinique (Cesaire, Fanon, Glissant, Gratiant, Sainville,
and Zobel); Paul Niger is from Guadeloupe; and Maran and Damas are
both of Guianese origin.5 Among the Africans, Alioune Diop, David
Diop, Ousmane Sembene, and Leopold Senghor are from Senegal;
Cheik Anta Diop and Hampate Ba—one a Bambara, the other a Peulh
—are from the former French Sudan (now Upper Volta and Mali);
Tevoedjre is from Dahomey, Agblemagnon from Togo, Beti from
Cameroon, Felix Tchicaya U Tam’si from Congo/Brazzaville, and Ber¬
nard Dadie from the Ivory Coast.
The Madagascans must be set apart. The dominant tribes in
Madagascar are not of African origin but Indonesian and Polynesian.
Ethnologists never include them among African societies. Yet we
could not exclude Jacques Rabemananjara from our study. He was too
intimately involved in the birth and development of Presence Afncaine
and, moreover, took as his own all the review’s political and cultural
ideas except that of race, even though he is black. Madagascans, even
the darkest, feel less “Negro” than “Malagasy.” Whether dark Melane¬
sians or light Indonesians, they all participate in the same culture,
which differs on many points from African cultures, and their insular
5. Rene Maran was born in Martinique of Guianese parents; he has, however, lived
chiefly in France (see chap. 6 above). We list Damas among West Indians for reasons
explained in chap. 20, note 10, above.
Black French-Language Writers in 1960: A Survey / 303
6. As we have mentioned several times, West Indian writers feel their African origins
keenly, doubtless in reaction to their socially inferior condition. In addition, due to the
fact that they were brought as slaves into a country occupied by whites, their “national
feeling has not been free to develop as it did among Madagascan populations, who were
already in control of their island and well organized before colonization.
7. A tribe originating in Indonesia and, according to information furnished by F.
Ranaivo, having intermarried quite extensively with Jews.
8. Tchicaya U Tam’si lived in his native country only until he was fourteen.
9. Rene Maran was administrator of Ubangi-Shari (see chap. 6 above).
10. This is also true of much black literature in English (/ Am Not a Free Man, by P.
Abrahams; Black Boy, by R. Wright, etc.).
304/AN END TO COLONIZATION
11. The greater majority of black writers are also university graduates: the four
Haitians mentioned above, Birago Diop and Ousmane Soce of Senegal, F. Sissoko of
the Sudan (now Mali), F. Oyono (Cameroon), B. Matip (Cameroon), Camara Laye, R.
Tardon, etc.
4
12. There seems to be a strong tendency today to reevaluate Creole. Several writers
believe it capable of playing a role of literary language. The principal attempts in this
direction were carried out by G. Gratiant, Fab'compe zicaque, poems (Fort-de-France:
Editions des Horizons Caraibes, 1958) and by Morisseau Leroy, who adapted Antigone
in Creole.
13. Five of the writers consulted (Fanon, Alioune Diop, Ba, Agblemagnon, and Cheik
Anta Diop) are not “men of letters” but “men of culture,” who write in defense of
certain ideas, without, however, having a particularly literary vocation. Yet they are
useful in situating the other writers: Their motives, their aims, expressed with color and
Black French-Language Writers in 1960: A Survey / 305
Western Literature
French
Out of seventeen writers, fifteen keenly appreciate French poetry.
The symbolists and their heirs were most often mentioned: Baudelaire
four times; Mallarme, Saint-John Perse, and Rimbaud three times; and
Claudel twice. The first two writers were admired for their plastic
qualities, the other three for their intense lyricism. The surrealists,
mentioned only by Cesaire, Damas, and Sainville (all former members
of the L 'Etudiant Noir group), did not seem to be especially appreciated
by the younger generation, who, on the other hand, were not indiffer¬
ent to the romantics. Several writers claimed that their poetic emotions
were first aroused in high school by Victor Hugo, Lamartine, and
lucidity, without exaggeration or lyricism, reveal the very skeleton, the guiding princi¬
ples of truly literary works, and are thus indispensable to a clear understanding of them.
14. Madagascan folk songs of a very special style, studied by Jean Paulhan in Les
hain-tenys (Paris: NRF, 1938).
306/AN END TO COLONIZATION
Negro Literature
French
The black writers questioned had obviously read the principal works
of their confreres, but we shall mention here only those authors whom
they “preferred.” Black poets are mentioned by twelve writers (out of
seventeen). Cesaire heads the list with eight votes, then Jacques Rou-
main (five votes), Senghor and Damas (three votes each), Rabemanan-
jara (two votes), and Camara Laye (one). The poets, more widely read
than the novelists,17 seemed to be appreciated for their pugnacity.
15. They are Paulin Joachim and Olympe Bhely-Quenum, both Catholic.
16. Interview with Edouard Glissant in June 1959. [Translator’s note: The “new-
wave novelists are writers like Michel Butor, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Natalie Sarraute, who
enjoyed great popularity in the 1950s.]
17. This can be explained by the fact that the Negro novel in French really blossomed
only late in the 1950s.
Black French-Language Writers in 1960: A Survey / 307
American Negro
Black American novelists were much more widely read by French-
speaking writers than black American poets. The elder generation
especially liked Claude McKay and Langston Hughes.18 The young
had read Richard Wright and Chester Himes and were not indifferent
to their violent realism.
Traditional
A great majority of the writers (eleven out of seventeen) showed a
keen interest in traditional African literature. Chaka, an epic novel
translated from the Bantu in 1939, telling the story of the great Zulu
chiefs revolt, was frequently mentioned.19 Many writers were also
much interested in their local literature (tales, legends, poems). The
Madagascans, especially, were anxious to link their own poetry to
indigenous traditions. This was also true of the Peuhl philosopher
Hampate Ba and of Bernard Dadie.
We should point out that all the black writers had been influenced
by Negro literature in one or more of the three categories: traditional,
American, and French. Since they had also been influenced equally by
Western literature, there is good reason to speak of a cultural cross¬
breeding, with two exceptions, however: Bernard Dadie and Hampate
Ba, who have had no French masters.20
24. Alioune Diop, conference at the Centre International, Brussels, 4 March 1960.
25. This same accusation stands out clearly from an investigation carried out by J. L.
Laroche among black schoolchildren at the extramural center in Elizabethville.
310/AN END TO COLONIZATION
26. Among certain African intellectuals, this religious faith occasionally seemed to us
rather artificial. The intellectuals seemed to emphasize this aspect of the African spirit
as a contrast to Western atheism today. It was a new way to underline their difference.
27. With regard to Islam, we would point out that the writers’ apparently Christian
background does not reflect the social realities of certain West African countries, which
occasionally are 70 percent Islamic, as in Guinea for example. In 1950, there were 6
million Moslems out of a population of 14 million in French West Africa; in the Sudan
Black French-Language Writers in 1960: A Survey / 311
3lA million Moslems out of 6V2 inhabitants (according to Albert N’Goma in “L’Islam
noir” in the special issue of Presence Afncaine devoted to Le Monde Non, Paris, 1950).
312/AN END TO COLONIZATION
the African Negro culture of the future should take traditions into
account?” The answers varied from “It is indispensable” to “It is
desirable,” with only two exceptions. Agblemagnon reacted against
the general tendency to “close Africa in upon itself.” “We must,” he
said, “have the courage to break free from certain aspects of African
life which have become incompatible with the exigencies of modern
life ... no matter how attractive the past may seem.” Frantz Fanon
sticks closely to the Marxist scheme: When the economy changes—as
will be the case in Africa—social relations will be modified, and it
would be vain to want to maintain the ancient “superstructures.” “Any
man who wishes to explicate traditional culture,” he said, “discovers
that the people have already gone beyond it.”
Apart from these two exceptions, the answers were generally posi¬
tive. They confirmed one of the principal themes of the two congresses
of black writers and artists: the originality of African Negro cultures.
In what way do the writers find the contribution of African cultures
interesting?
The answers refer mainly to the artistic (fifteen positive answers) and
literary (thirteen positive answers) domains: The black man has an¬
other history, other myths, different qualities of sensibility from the
Westerner, and also other means of expression, which urgently need
to be freed from European constraints.
Eleven writers point out the advantages of traditional social struc¬
tures, emphasizing their solidarity and the community spirit. Political
and economic organization, as well as religious beliefs, are now rarely
defended although their quintessence is retained: democracy and mys¬
ticism.
Generally speaking, intellectuals are convinced that it is necessary to
adapt, to “Africanize,” the West’s political and economic systems, and
particularly its ideologies. The prevailing idea in both congresses was
to “de-Westernize Negro cultures.” We should point out, however,
the ever-increasing difficulty young Negroes have seeking their origins
in a changing society which is rapidly becoming Westernized.
A writer can set himself a number of aims of unequal importance.
The two most frequently indicated by black authors are the ones we
shall now consider: Are they concerned about creating something
artistic? How do they conceive their intellectual responsibilities?
Every writer is anxious to write well, to present living and psycholog¬
ically coherent characters, to construct his novel. But not all neces¬
sarily wish to create, to enrich literature with some original, personal
work. As Mongo Beti admits, many young black writers were thrust
into literature by circumstance. They were stimulated by political con¬
ditions as well as by the pressure of the group which had formed
around Presence Afncaine. Also, awareness of their responsibilities as
Black French-Language Writers in 1960: A Survey / 313
29. Rene Menil, “Naissance de notre art” in Tropiques, no. 1 (April 1944).
30. We are particularly referring to the work of Paulin Joachim, Sylvere Alcandre, and
the recent Bernard Dadie.
Black French-Language Writers in 1960: A Survey/ 315
Literature must lead to thought, must be the opportunity for becoming aware
of oneself, for challenging established ideas (P. Niger).
31. Joseph Ki Zerbo, “Histoire et conscience negre,” Presence Afncaine, no. 16 (Octo-
ber-November 1957).
316/AN END TO COLONIZATION
but they know that black elites read their work and transmit its contents
and ideas.32
Our duty as men of culture, our double duty is this: to hasten decolonization
now, and at this very moment to prepare a good decolonization, a decoloniza¬
tion without any aftereffects. . . .
It is perfectly true to say that it is generally among common people that
national feeling survives in the most direct and obvious manner, in the face
of strongest colonial oppression. But it is also true to say that this direct feeling
must be made authentic, must be purified and propagated.33
32. The events of the early 1960s in the former Belgian Congo—which has not yet
produced any valid modern literature—shows the importance of the mediation of writ¬
ers and their role as educators and liberators.
33. Aime Cesaire, “L’homme de culture et ses responsabilites,” Presence Afncaine, issue
devoted to the Second Congress, p. 117.
34. L. S. Senghor, “Les elites de l’Union Frangaise au service de leurs peuples,”
lecture delivered at Conseil de la Jeunesse de l’Union Frangaise, Yaounde, Cameroon,
25 August 1953.
A New Generation and
the Negritude Label
This was obviously the path which was going to be chosen by numer¬
ous young poets, often without future, and in several issues of Presence
317
318/AN END TO COLONIZATION
5. Except where otherwise stated, the quotations are from our interviews with these
writers.
6. Jacques Rabemananjara, “Le poete noir et son peuple,” Presence Afncaine, no. 16
(October-November 1957), p. 12.
7. Ibid., p. 21.
A New Generation and the Negritude Label / 319
8. Ibid., p. 12.
9. He is of the Betsimisaraka race, which came from Oceania and is probably a blend
of Melanesian and Polynesian (L. S. Senghor, Anthologie, p. 194).
10. This is confirmed by Flavien Ranaivo, who is also a Madagascan but of Indonesian
origin, and who compares negritude to racism.
11. Of course, we realize that negritude in the future will be quite different from
present-day negritude. Born of three factors—racial prejudice, white domination, and
a common civilization—it will see the disappearance of the first two factors, and there¬
fore persist in a modified form, but will always endure as the mark of the black man’s
“being-in-the-world.” See chap. 9 above.
320/AN END TO COLONIZATION
12. Resolutions of the Second Congress, published in the Presence Afncavne issue
devoted to this congress, pp. 389-90.
A New Generation and the Negritude Label / 321
mourn for them, but to draw upon their magnificent vitality which the
world needs. Negritude is a slow-burning light from which all violence
is excluded; it is a solar Pentecost, that sinks into my past in order to
reawaken burnt-out suns. It is a horse I bestride, it is also the aim, the
day after colonialism, when the Negro will truly be himself. It is both
the path and the goal.” Less lyrically, here is how Olympe Bhely-
Quenum defines negritude: “The exhuming of Negro cultural values,
which have been stifled, their explication and affirmation. I hope to see
negritude rid of its political context. The role of black writers is to
show that negritude progresses, that it eliminates racism.”
Let us now examine the principal themes the black writers address.
A majority—eighteen—speak of colonization, in a different way, of
course, depending upon whether they are poets, novelists, or essayists.
Poetry lends itself better to lyrical cries of pain and revolt (Cesaire,
Damas, Rabemananjara, Senghor, Niger, David Diop, and Bernard
Dadie). The novel is better adapted to concrete situations, and one
learns a great deal through novels about the condition of colonized
natives and their psychology; colonization and the white man are ex¬
posed to a light of day never found in colonial magazines, too rarely
in official reports or the exotic novels of outsiders. Finally, essayists
like A. Tevoedjre, Alioune Diop, or Frantz Fanon bring weighty, scien¬
tific arguments to bear. With figures and documentation they demon¬
strate the great destitution and material want of the black masses, their
acute frustration, the disastrous psychological effects of colonization,
the complexes and alienations which result from it.
Let us briefly call attention to the aspects of Western domination most
frequently revealed in the works of black writers. Together they form
quite an indictment!
The Caribbean writers (Damas, Cesaire, Sainville, Glissant, and Ni¬
ger)13 often come back to slavery, still an incredibly tenacious wound.
But the Africans too had cause to complain of a loss of liberty. Through
feelings of solidarity they too are interested in the ancient slavery, but
rather from its historical angle; they study the archives in order to
describe the slave trade, and attempt to account for Africa’s deca¬
dence. For these African writers, however, slavery is never a source of
literary inspiration.
Most of the writers describe with considerable force the multiple
aspects of poverty and destitution: ever-present hunger, hard and poorly
paid work, sickness and death, illiteracy, poverty of the land,14 where
peasants labor for beggarly wages, or the poverty of the cities with
13. This is also true of Haitian writers: Roumain, Depestre, Brierre, R. Belance, and
R. Tardon.
14. This is especially true of Cesaire, Zobel, Glissant, J. S. Alexis, and Jacques Rou¬
main (i.e., mainly of the West Indies).
322/AN END TO COLONIZATION
15. This is true of Mongo Beti, Niger, Ousmane Sembene, Tchicaya U Tam’si, Ce-
saire, Abdoulaye Sadji, and B. Juminer.
16. L. S. Senghor, “Congres constitutif du P.R.A.” (mimeographed), p. 47.
17. Gunnar Myrdal, Theorie economique et pays s ous-dev eloppes (Paris: Presence Africaine,
1959), p. 91.
18. Daniel Guerin, Les Antilles decolonisees (Paris: Presence Africaine, 1956); Bureau
International du Travail, Les problemes du travail en Afnque noire (Geneva, 1958).
A New Generation and the Negritude Label / 323
are interested in African life, but as a European would be. This was the
case of Rene Maran, who had a feeling of community with other blacks,
having himself suffered from color prejudice. He studied their customs
with considerable objectivity, though without participating in their
culture. Some of the younger writers, like David Diop and Elolongue
Epanya Yondo, already influenced by the “negritude movement,” feel
frustrated, and their works seem pained, rebellious, directed toward
the future. How different the equilibrium of Senghor or Birago Diop,
or of good novelists like Ake Loba and Olympe Bhely-Quenum, who
had the advantage of participating in Negro cultures, even if they had
been diminished or distorted. Cesaire, though he has never been to
Dahomey, might thus feel comfortable in the culture of that country.19
Much of the flavor of the novels on rural Caribbean life, too, comes
from the fact that their authors remained close to the ordinary people,
their mores, beliefs, and mentalities. In the West Indies, the clearing
and harvesting of the land is always a community project carried out
to the sound of tom-toms. Voodoo rites, predictions, superstitions,
belief in metamorphoses and in “quimboi” love potions are still an
intimate part of the popular sensibility.
The novels show the obstinacy of these small, hard-working com¬
munities, their spirit of mutual aid, also their sense of humor which
helps to balance lives so difficult they would be unbearable if faced on
the tragic level. They tell of simple, uncomplicated loves, of men and
women for whom sexuality has cosmic extensions.20 How far the
delicacy of the two scenes that follow is from the stifling eroticism of
French novels today:
Ce qui court entre eux, c’est plus que la grace aigue du desir, plus que
l’inefifable et le grondement, bien plus encore que l’assurance des deux arbres
qui auraient joint leurs racines sous la surface . . . oho! c’est le charroi de toute
la seve, c’est le cri meme de la racine, ho! c’est la geste venue du fond des ages,
qu’ont parfait les ancetres et que void renaitre.
[What flows between them is more than the sweet intensity of desire, greater
than what is unutterable or looming, greater even than the certainty of two
trees whose roots have intertwined beneath the surface . . . oh! It is the rising
of all the sap, the very cry of their roots, the age-old motion perfected by their
ancestors and born with them anew.]
Ils coulerent dans le temps qui jusqu’a eux menait sa riviere sans crue, ils
furent sur l’ocean, ils furent dans la revoke, ils connurent le gout des fruits
19. See the discussions of the First Congress of Black Writers and Artists published
in Presence Afncaine, p. 73.
20. “Fecundity and mysticism. To my mind, this is most specifically negritic’’ (P. Niger
in Les puissants [Paris: Editions du Scorpion, 1958], p. 215).
324/AN END TO COLONIZATION
[They streamed through time which had brought its floodless river to them,
they rode the ocean, were part of the fugitives’ forests, they returned together
to a present almost bright.]
21. Edouard Glissant, La lezarde (Paris: Seuil, 1958), pp. 148 and 207. Translated as
The Ripening (New York: Braziller, 1959).
22. By Camara Laye (Paris: Plon, 1954). Translated The African Child (London: Collier
Macmillan, 1959), and The Dark Child (New York: Farrar, Straus Sc Giroux, 1969).
23. By Abdoulaye Sadji (Paris: Presence Africaine, 1958).
24. By Mongo Beti (Paris: Correa, 1957). Translated King Lazarus (London: Muller,
1961; Heinemann Educational Books [African Writers Series], 1970).
25. Interview with Agblemagnon, June 1959.
A New Generation and the Negritude Label / 325
The reason for this may be that these writers, whom we may call
“traditionalist,” are more deeply rooted in their ancestral cultures
than their fellow writers, either because, like Hampate Ba, Paul Ha-
zoume, or Jean Malonga, their contact with Europe was very sparse
and late, or because, like Birago Diop or Bhely-Quenum, they had
thought through their culture deeply and were able to take new root
in it. These authors seem to have acquired a balance which enables
them to extract greater richness from their heritage. The polemical
writers, perhaps because they are more Westernized, seem frustrated
and more deeply wounded. For them rebellion seems the natural out¬
let. They are both closer to the West and more bitterly opposed to its
influence, which they consider evil. Such is the case of Cesaire, Damas,
David Diop, Fanon, Beti, Epanya, and others.
We only suggest this as a hypothesis, one which of course has no
effect on the literary value of these writers.
One is struck however by the small role played by personal themes
of love, death, nature, God, etc. Not that these do not frequently
occur in the works of the two main schools of writers previously
discussed, but we have never, for example, come across the classi¬
cal love story involving two or three characters so popular in
France since Madame de Lafayette. Nor are there subtle introspec¬
tions like those of Proust or Sartre! Very little meditation on death
or nature! In the African Negro novels or poems, the individual is
part of the people and the society from which he originates. Even
when he says “I” he means “we.” He represents his people. He
reinvests all personal emotion in a more general current. For Glis-
sant and Rabemananjara, for example, feelings of love are always
“reinvested” in the themes of freedom, love of country, or the
bond with one’s ancestors. Even in works that seek to defend no
thesis, such as those by F.-D. Sissoko, J. Zobel, or J. Malonga, the
action is never limited to the adventures of a few individuals; the
principal subject is always the community, and the life of the
group.26
Among traditional values they most appreciate, black intellectuals
often single out solidarity, a sense of community. An interesting com¬
parison could certainly be made here between ancient African culture
and this aspect of literary works by black writers today.
The genres in which black writers prefer to express themselves are
26. An exception to this general rule must, however, be made for a whole series of
autobiographical novels describing the tribulations of young blacks—usually students—
who arrive in France. Whether well or less well analyzed, one discovers in them the
efforts of naive, uprooted blacks who attempt to penetrate and find acceptance in a white
milieu, the prejudices encountered, the snubs, the disappointments, material difficulties,
and loneliness. The hero fights, triumphs, or is defeated. The most successful novel of
this type seems to us Ake Loba’s Kocoumbo, I'etudiant noir (Paris: Flammarion, 1960).
326/AN END TO COLONIZATION
27. Krea’s father was French, but he was brought up in Algeria by his Moslem mother.
Author of La revolution et la poesie sont une seule et meme chose (Paris: P. J. Oswald). The
quotations are from an interview by the French daily L'Express of 21 July 1960.
28. As in the case of Negro spirituals, for example.
29. Paris: Stock, 1960.
A New Generation and the Negritude Label / 327
30. Jean Malonga’s tales, by their breadth of style and generality of appeal, are
practically novels.
31. Paris: Presence Africaine, 1954.
32. Paris: Presence Africaine, 1960. Although there has been considerable discussion
regarding their scientific value and the exaggeration of the opinions expressed, the
works of Cheik Anta Diop created such a stir that they were considered, at that period,
as inciting negritude.
33. See chap. 8 above.
328/AN END TO COLONIZATION
sume to represent more than themselves, the fact that these writers
engage in real action should not surprise us. It merely makes their
artistic vocation more authentic. In his article “Le leader politique
considere comme le representant d’une culture,”34 Sekou Toure has
an excellent perception of the close bond between the defender of a
national culture—which is what these black writers seek to be—and
political action.
We asked the writers: “Do you consider yourself‘committed’ writ¬
ers?” We admit this is rather vaguely put, covering too much and
signifying too little; the term, moreover, has been far too loosely used.
It is difficult nowadays to know who is “committed,” to what and how.
Fortunately we had at our disposal a very clear statement, thought out
and elaborated by the black writers themselves:
During the present, temporary situation of the black peoples, the responsibili¬
ties (of the black writer) rest essentially on three urgent points:
(a) The writer’s contribution to the development of native languages, in all
countries where such development is indispensable.
(b) The true expression of his people’s reality, long dimmed, distorted, or
denied during the course of colonization. This expression is so necessary under
present conditions that it implies on the part of the black writer or artist an
individual definition of the idea ofi commitment. Black writers can only participate spontane¬
ously and completely in the general movement we have outlined. The importance of his action
is immediate. How can he refuse it ?
(c) Finally and above all, [he must] contribute to the development and
progress of black peoples and, particularly in those countries where the issue
arises, to the struggle for their independence, since the existence of a national
state will naturally encourage the flowering of a positive and fertile culture.35
We have already studied these three requirements: The writer, we said,
could consider himself a spokesman (“as truly expressing the reality of
his people”) an educator (“contributing to the development and pro¬
gress of black peoples”) and a liberator of his people (“in the struggle
for independence”).
In this sense the majority of black writers do feel “committed,”
because they are aware of their responsibilities and determined to
answer for them in their works—and often also in their extraliterary
political action. We should not find this awareness surprising among
an intellectual elite who feel observed and relied upon by the masses.
For black writers, commitment is therefore the core around which his
entire life is organized. In the past few years, this attitude has devel¬
oped sharply, as seen by discussions on the responsibilities of black
intellectuals organized in 1956 by Presence Afncaine—discussions which
34. Message of the Second Congress in Rome published in Presence Afncaine, pp. 104ff.
35. “Resolutions concernant la litterature,” in the special issue of Presence Afncaine
devoted to the Second Congress, p. 389, italics ours.
A New Generation and the Negritude Label / 329
and more poetic than his poems written directly in French. In the Creole poems Gratiant
reveals his true personality. See the translations published by Senghor in his Anthologie.
A New Generation and the Negritude Label / 331
ling, and that they may now be able to break away from the rut in which
their literary efforts are in danger of foundering—even if they have to
give up political or extraliterary social action. A tendency to separate
these two domains is therefore gradually taking shape, in order to gain
greater freedom for literary expression and creation.
But this is still a wish! Glissant’s reply is typical. According to him,
politics and literature cannot, at the present time, be either separated
or fused. A literary work can doubtless have political “significance,”
but a writer must refrain from politicizing when writing. Glissant re¬
grets then that today’s Negro literature should so often be a fighting
literature.39 It is also this combative aspect which struck G. Balandier,
to such an extent that he somewhat neglected less aggressive works
even though they were often of better quality: “Novels on African
morals and manners are no longer merely educational works, but
truths released with a view to rehabilitation, aiming to destroy false
notions about Negroes.”40 Yet Bhely-Quenum feels that black writers
have been withdrawing from political problems since 1953 and are
now attempting to make Africa better known.
39. Glissant criticizes Cahier for being “too historically situated. To use his expres¬
sion, this work is “a brilliant perception of its moment,” and he compares it to the
Tragiques by Agrippa d’Aubigne. Glissant’s ambition is rather to play the role of a
Ronsard, “who contributed to the elaboration of the sixteenth century.’’
40. G. Balandier, “Litterature noire de langue frangaise,’’ in Le Monde Non, p. 396.
332/AN END TO COLONIZATION
41. The thesis which is the object of this book was submitted in January 1961, thus
before Algeria obtained its independence.
VI CONCLUSIONS
A Contribution to
the Larger Humanism
Et surtout mon corps aussi bien que mon ame, gardez-vous de vous croiser
les bras en l’attitude sterile du spectateur, car la vie n’est pas un spectacle, car
une mer de douleur n’est pas un proscenium.1
[And if all I know how to do is speak, it is for you that I shall speak.
My lips shall speak for miseries that have no mouth, my voice shall be the
liberty of those who languish in the dungeon of despair. . . .
And above all my body as well as my soul, beware of folding your arms in the
sterile attitude of spectator, for life is not a spectacle, for a sea of pain is not
a proscenium.]
Cesaire wrote these words in 1939. Things have not changed: “The
young generation of black writers,” G. Balandier has said, “. . . feel
they have not only personal vocations but also a mission.”2 Sartre had
already called them “evangelical,”3 and the HaitianJ. S. Alexis summa¬
rizes admirably:
In the present predicament.. . the mission of our creators is to sing the beauty,
tragedies, and struggles of our exploited peoples, reexamining the canons
developed by Western cultures in relation to the cultural riches of our land.4
335
336/CONCLUSIONS
Art for art’s sake does not therefore have a monopoly on perfection,
and the poet who only sings for himself is no greater than the writer
who seeks to represent a group. The New Negro literary movement
5. Aime Patri, “Deux poetes noirs en langue frangaise,” in Presence Africaine, no. 3.
A Contribution to the Larger Humanism / 337
Yet at the same time, this new language is expressed in such stirring
and special terms that it is singularly strengthened and arouses our
interest to a far greater extent.
Because the problems of their peoples were also truly their own, by
assuming them in order better to reveal them the best of the black
writers discovered themselves, “remorselessly, unflinchingly” grow¬
ing to maturity true to their own sap.7 From this unique flowering,
universal literature today is gathering “the succulence of fruit.”
Pain and revolt are eternal themes, but blacks have revealed new
ways of suffering. These ancient, suppurating afflictions, the long hor¬
ror of slavery, the wounds of racism, and the racial inferiority complex
had never yet been described in the French language. The fiery impre¬
cations of Victor Hugo are quite different from the guttural cries of the
immense resurrection of a continent and a race.
Moi qui Krakatoa
moi que tout mieux que mousson
moi qui poitrine ouverte
moi qui lailape
moi qui bele mieux que cloaque
moi qui hors de gamme
moi qui Zambeze ou frenetique ou rhombe ou cannibale
[I who Krakatoa
I who so much better than the monsoon
I who chest wide open
I who Laelaps
I who bleat better than the cloaca
I who beyond the limits of the scale
I who Zambezi or frenetic or rhombic or cannibal
Nor had we ever before felt this “shock of being seen.’’9 In the
mirror the blacks hold out for us, we see the tragic miscarriage of our
civilizing action. No one, thus far, had shown us such a cruel reflection
of ourselves.
Washed clean at last of all the picturesque, gaudy exoticism which
for so long had hidden them, West Indian and African cultures show
us their true face: blunt, intense, and rhythmic as their dances and their
statues. A profusion of images, names of places and objects, plants and
animals, fascinating in their poetic sound and suggestive power, now
swarm into our universe. Symbols too, unlike ours. The artist creates
them out of his indigenous milieu—Cesaire, the volcano, the sun, the
island; Glissant, the river called “La Lezarde”; and Rabemananjara,
the lamba10—or else they are drawn from their African cultures: the
moon, scorpions, waves. One finds these African symbols in the West
Indies too, occasionally distorted or with a somewhat different mean¬
ing—for example the snake, the only dangerous animal in these is¬
lands, which thus acquires, in addition to its African meaning of fecun¬
dity, an aggressiveness unknown in Africa. Other symbols too rise
from Negro history: Allusions to travel are the slave trade which
brought them to America; “irons’’ (ferrements) represent for Cesaire
the chains and leg irons of slavery, but also the bondage of colonized
peoples, to which is added in the French a suggestive pun “ferments”
12. Paris: Presses Universitaires, 1948; 2d ed., 1969. [Translator’s note: Senghor s
anthology has never been translated, although Sartre’s preface, “Orphee noir, has.
Poetry of the negritude school has been collected in several more recent anthologies,
however, in both bilingual and English-translation-only editions: See the bibliography
for volumes by editors Collins, Jones, Kennedy, and Shapiro.]
13. A. Cesaire, “Question prealable,” in Soleil cou coupe, p. 88.
14. With a few exceptions, for example, Charles de Coster and Michel de Ghelderode.
342/CONCLUSIONS
There is no white world, there are no white ethics any more than there is
a white intelligence.
There are in every part of the world men who search.16
Isn’t this the meaning of the whole New Negro cultural movement
we have just studied? Once the goal is attained, must it renounce its
faith?
We are men of dialogue, of the type of dialogue which mobilizes and com¬
mits the best of man to the encounter with mankind.17
16. Frantz Fanon, Peau noire, masques blancs, pp. 219-20; translated as Black Skin, White
Masks (New York: Grove, 1967), pp. 228-29.
17. Alioune Diop, opening speech of the Second Congress, in Presence Afncaine, p. 47.
18. Aime Cesaire, “L’homme de culture et ses responsabilites,” Presence Afncaine,
February-May 1959, p. 120.
A Contribution to the Larger Humanism / 345
This essay, amended by the author in 1971, originally appeared in Abbia, Cameroon
Cultural Review (Yaounde), no. 8 (February-March 1965), pp. 13-28; it is printed here
by permission of the author.
349
350/APPENDIX
new poets wrote on themes that have become classical; Rene Depestre,
Georges Desportes, Paulin Joachim, Elolongue Epanya Yondo, La-
mine Diakhate. Finally one should note the very important influence
of major essayists like Alioune Diop, Cheik Anta Diop, Frantz Fanon,
Mamadou Dia, Sekou Toure, Padmore, Amadou Hampate Ba, Jomo
Kenyatta, and Aime Cesaire.
Nineteen sixty: the world changes. It is the year of African indepen¬
dence. The Negro diaspora, reunited under a single banner while
struggling for liberty, breaks up, once that freedom is acquired. True,
the hope of pan-Africanism is not abandoned. But each independent
country chooses nationalism first, before taking the risk of the great
Negro unity. This is a fact even if it is temporary, and one which has
cultural consequences.
Negro African literature today is seeking its way. Its themes and
literary genres are decelerating, as its aims are becoming more diver¬
sified. A series of authors, who were indeed heroic tenors of the
polemic literature, grew silent as soon as the goal of independence had
been achieved. Some were only writers of circumstance, provoked by
the situation of crisis. Others were seeking new direction.
Those who continue to be geared to politics will differ according to
their country of origin and the themes they broach. While the English-
speaking American, Caribbean, and South African writers sometimes
carry their vindication to an extreme in isolated but all the more
strident cries, the majority of African writers concentrate on internal
problems of their native lands. In Mali the novels of Seydou Badian
and Mamadou Gologo study the conflict of generations, the coexist¬
ence of traditional and modern societies. In Senegal, Cheikh Hamidou
Kane raises the same problems to a philosophic level, as he treats the
difficulty of integrating the culture of Descartes and a certain African
mysticism. In his next novel Kane will treat the ups and downs of
decolonization, the changes that take place, the mentalities of different
social classes. With less subtlety, and in a style more “socialist-realis¬
tic,” Ousmane Sembene too devotes himself to the detailed descrip¬
tion of present African society in his recent novels Vharmattan, Le
mandat, and Vehi-ciosane.
This preoccupation with the present and the objective translating of
the real can be found in two genres that have flourished since indepen¬
dence: the theater and the short story. In Cameroon as well as in
Nigeria, a theater of manners has developed, presenting on the stage,
often in parody, the principal problems of African social life: alcohol¬
ism, unemployment, dowry, forced marriage, corruption of officials,
conflicts between generations, conflicts between traditional chiefs and
government officials and between European medicine and African
witchcraft. All these themes translate the impact of two civilizations in
352/APPENDIX
confrontation with each other, the break with traditional culture un¬
dergone by some, the absurd and tragic situations that result from this.
The same situations are sometimes treated from a political point of
view, in pamphlets like Daniel Ewande’s Vive le president and such excel¬
lent novels as Les soleils des independances by Ahmadou Kourouma. The
themes are treated in varying fashion: Certain authors preach the
upholding of traditions, while others are resolutely modern, thus
showing clearly the hesitation before scales of opposing values which
characterizes the recently decolonized African.
The most successful in the dramatic field in Cameroon are the plays
of Guillaume Oyono-Mbia, Jacques Mariel Nzouankeu, and Etienne
Yanou. The same themes recur in the work of the great Nigerian Wole
Soyinka and the Ruandese Saverio Naigiziki. Short stories, too, by
Ousmane Sembene, Bernard Dadie, and Rene Philombe are quick to
broach these problems of present-day life. The short story, moreover,
is a genre that lends itself splendidly to the expression of the African
soul. In its familiar turn of mind and relative brevity, the short story
is close to the folktale, an African genre traditionally much cultivated.
The short story adapts as well to sketches of daily life as to surrealist
mysteries. That is why one finds it everywhere today, in the second
major area that African literature is exploring, that of renewing oral
traditions.
Jacques Nzouankeu and Benjamin Matip, Ibrahim Seid and Jean
Malonga, Abdou Anta Ka and Camara Laye continue this vein already
explored by Birago Diop, Ousmane Soce, Bernard Dadie and Lomani
Tchibamba. In their short, piquant works, they re-create the fantastic
and humorous world of village vigils around the fire. If the tale takes
on larger proportions, it becomes an epic novel like Soundjata by Dji-
bril Tamsir Niane, an epic poem or “total theater” like the La mort de
Chaka of Seydou Badian and the Poemes afncaines of Keita Fodeba, or
a philosophical poem like the tale of the spider in the tradition of the
mvet Beti. At this point, theater, poetry, and song are mingled. For the
writers who draw inspiration from oral literature very often do the
work of adapters and even of translators, and thus combine the func¬
tion of poets and ethnologists. They are in the process of recuperating
for world civilization a whole invisible cultural heritage now threat¬
ened with extinction. At the same time it seems to us they are also
discovering the most fertile formulae for a vigorous and original flow¬
ering of Negro African literature.
On the other hand, we are witnessing a regression of the autobio¬
graphical novel which served as a training ground for the generation
before independence, as well as a retreat from anticolonialism in po¬
etry. Here, too, one finds today either a commitment of the militant,
partisan sort, or a return to traditional sources, with poets trying their
Problems of the Literary Critic / 353
which African problems are dealt with from the white man’s point of
view. For instance, in discussing problems connected with marriage,
the author may be systematically hostile to polygamy and the dowry
system; in the case of tribal authority, he will not have a single good
word to say for the rule of the village elders. He will declare that a man
who holds a diploma from the white man’s school, or one who has lived
in France, is invariably and on all points superior to the product of a
traditional upbringing who possesses the wisdom that goes with it, the
learning and experience of the ancients. Such a writer will nearly
always jeer at the village sorcerer, dismiss traditional ceremonies as
mere superstition, and condemn established customs as hopelessly out
of date. He will take it for granted that the city dweller is superior to
the villager and uphold the former as the very pattern of progress and
civilization.
Such writing faithfully mirrors the distorted outlook peculiar to the
French-speaking colonized person who has lost confidence in himself
or his own culture. It expresses the mentality—a very prevalent one,
alas—of the urbanized African, torn from his tribal environment, re¬
duced to economic and moral instability, and convinced that his only
chance of survival is to develop along European lines, yet still divided,
torn between two sets of values.
Yet these ostensibly “progressive” writings reflect only part of the
reality. They try to conceal the psychological cleavage. They take a
position more radical than that of their authors. But a certain spurious,
affected, artificial tone gives them away; they defend their views with
white men’s arguments, and are rather too lofty in their dismissal of
traditions as only good for savages.
Once a critic has noticed this inconsistency, he should try to get in
touch with the writer concerned, either directly or by inducing him to
tell the truth as he sees it (even at the risk of giving European readers
a shock) and to describe the problems that disturb him in their full
complexity. For instance, one can urge a writer to attack abuses of the
dowry system or of polygamy, not the institutions themselves, which
have sound roots in African civilization. One must never, of course, try
to influence the actual ideas of a writer, only to make him feel that he
is entitled to put down everything he has in his mind. And his mind
is never completely turned against his traditional culture.
In such cases the critic acts as a sort of cultural psychoanalyst. His
task is to restore confidence to the victim suffering from an anxiety
brought on by colonial education-—whose most prominent characteris¬
tic (vividly described by Fanon in Peau noire, masques blancs) is his urge
to escape from the Negro condition, a characteristic which recurs with
remarkable frequency in the process of creative writing. (I must men¬
tion that I agree with Monsieur Anozie’s reaction to the myth of the
360/APPENDIX
tration, and truth to facts his play far excels that of the brilliant jurist.
It does happen that an intellectual manages to achieve the rare synthe¬
sis of fine French and an abundance of idiomatic images and expres¬
sion. This is the miracle of Diab'la, by Joseph Zobel, or Les soleils des
independances, by Ahmadou Kourouma. But miracles are so rare.
I am frequently reminded these days of something said by Rene
Maran at the Rome Congress in 1959, which struck me at the time as
paradoxical: “The real literature of negritude will be written a few
years hence by peasants in the Africian bush who know French just well
enough to write it more or less correctly.’’
Confronted by traditional literature, the European literary critic
feels really baffled. Yet he cannot ignore it, for as I said before, it is
by far the most important. Besides, its influence is continually demon¬
strated in modern writing, either by anecdotes concerning its heroes
or allusions to its epic events, or by long-familiar forms of expression
which are purely and simply carried over into French from the fund of
tradition. Sooner or later, therefore, any conscientious critic feels irre¬
sistibly impelled to trace the oral literature back to its sources.
At once, however, he finds the road strewn with pitfalls. For one
thing, oral literature, as such, is virtually inaccessible to the foreigner.
Needless to say we can enjoy listening to a gnot or a mvet singer,
appreciate his mimicry, and have his tale translated for us. But to be
honest, we are complete ignoramuses in the matter, and the only
competent critics of such literary sessions are the Africans themselves;
they alone can decide which are best among their performers.
Even when an epic poem or legend is written down in the vernacular,
it remains inaccessible to most people, just like modern writing in the
Yoruba, Souto, or Swahili languages. The essential is saved, however,
for those who know the language can now study the work in its perma¬
nent form. Those who do not can hope that it will be translated, or
even arrange to have it translated.
But when at last the work reaches us in translation or adaptation, it
is still far from easy for us to form an opinion about it. We have read
and enjoyed the folktales written by Birago Diop and Bernard Dadie,
the epics of Soundjata, Samba Full, and Chaka, the fantastic novels of
Jean Malonga and Amos Tutuola, and the interminable adventures of
Akomomba. We still find ourselves in difficulty when it comes to judg¬
ing them, classifying them, and deducing the laws that govern them.
We tend to find everything interesting; we are perhaps too prompt
with our wondering admiration, for it all seems to us to be new and
original. In present circumstances, indeed, this attitude is preferable
to the opposite one; for before we are able to express any worthwhile
opinion about this oral literature, we must collect as much of it as we
possibly can.
Meanwhile, we can assess the importance of an individual work in
362/APPENDIX
the light of its poetic content, the richness and scope of its episodes,
and the wealth of legend it conveys (provided our ethnological knowl¬
edge is sufficient).
Another standard of judgment particularly applicable in Africa,
where one of the basic characteristics of literature is its functional
purpose, is that of the social implications of a work, the extent of its
geographical range, and its historical importance for a particular
group. For instance, the settlement of the Beti tribe in South Came¬
roon after the Foulbe thrust had driven them from their own lands
across the Sanaga River has given rise to a number of epic poems,
because the events described caused an upheaval in the life of the
people and acted as a proportionate stimulus to the imagination of
their poets. At this point I should say that in Africa the literary critic
needs to be something of a sociologist as well, not relying solely on
aesthetic criteria. We are considering a society in which all branches
of culture are closely interwoven. We must not create artificial divi¬
sions, separating the mask from its religious function or the epic from
its educational purpose. To do so would be to weaken the very struc¬
ture of traditional African culture.
The fact remains that, as the Italian proverb points out, all transla¬
tion is a betrayal; and so it is that we lose many of the elements of oral
literature—its rhythm, which is an essential feature, its onomatopoeia,
its songs and the accompanying dance and mime that make it a com¬
plete theatrical performance. The loss is considerable.
We also fail to grasp the meaning of much of its imagery, many of
the proverbs it contains, and sometimes of whole episodes, as happens
with Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Dnnkard (Grove, 1962). We would need
fuller information about the author or about his tribal traditions.
Moreover, we have difficulty in appreciating certain forms of humor.
Africans, for instance, will laugh heartily at scenes of cruelty or at
peculiarities that we find horrifying or boring. This is a question of a
different scale of values, of cultural dissimilarities.
Finally, there are some expressions which defy translation, and these
are always the most characteristic and the rarest. The critic is repeat¬
edly taken aback by finding that Africans are disappointed at the trans¬
lation of some work they already know in its vernacular original.
There is, however, something that the foreign critic in Africa can
accomplish. He can do his utmost to encourage the African research
students who are collecting oral material and traditions. Their work is
a matter of urgency, for the lapidary phrase used by the great Hampate
Ba rings in our ears like a parting bell: “Whenever an old man dies,
it is as though a library had been burnt to the ground.”
The critic can help to arrange for tape recordings, translations,
Problems of the Literary Critic / 363
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367
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-L'unite culturelle de TAfnque noire. Paris: Presence Africaine, 1959. Trans¬
lated The Cultural Unity of Negro Afnca. Paris: Presence Africaine, 1970.
-L'Afnque noire pre-colomale. Paris: Presence Africaine, 1960.
Diop, David (Senegal). “Contribution au debat sur la poesie nationale.” Pre¬
sence Afncaine, no. 6 (1956), pp. 113-15.
- (poems). Coups de Pilon. Paris: Presence Africaine, 1956.
-“Ten Poems.” In French and English; new translations by Paulette J.
Trout and Ellen Conroy Kennedy. Journal of the New Afncan Literature and
the Arts, no. 5/6 (Spring and Fall 1968), pp. 28-49.
Dogbeh-David, G. Richard (Dahomey, poems). Les eaux du mono. Vire, Cal¬
vados, France: Societe Lec-Vire, 1963.
_ (poem). Rives mortelles. Porto Novo, India: Editions Silva, 1964.
_ (poems). Cap liberte. Yaounde: Editions C.L.E., 1969.
Epanya Yondo, Elolongue (Cameroon, poems). Kamerun! Kamerun! Paris: Pres¬
ence Africaine, 1960.
374/SELECTED bibliography
Periodicals
Abbia: Cameroon Cultural Review, B.P. 808, Yaounde, Cameroon. Published
by the Minister of National Education. Appears irregularly, several issues
a year. Articles in English and French.
African Arts/Arts dAfrique: Published by African Studies Center, University of
California, Los Angeles. Four issues a year, one primarily devoted to
literature. Articles in English and French.
African Forum (1965-68): Published by American Society of African Culture,
401 Broadway, New York, 10013. Quarterly review, several issues devoted
primarily to literature.
African Literature Today: Editor Eldred Jones, Heinemann Educational Books,
48 Charles St., London W.l. Formerly two issues yearly, now annual
hardcover edition. Critical and interpretive articles.
LAfnque Actuelle: Published by Olympe Bhely-Quenum, 23, rue Barbet-de-
Jouy, Paris 2 . Monthly, bilingual.
LAfnque Litteraire et Artistique: Published by Societe africaine d’edition, 32, rue
de l’Echiquier, Paris 10 . Bimonthly. Creative work and criticism.
Black Orpheus: Editor Abiola Irele, Mbari Publications, Ibadan, Nigeria. African
and Afro-American literature.
Black World (formerly Negro Digest): Editor Hoyt Fuller, Johnson Publications,
Chicago, Illinois. Monthly.
Jeune Afnque: Published by a group of North Africans, 51, Avenue des Ternes,
Paris 17e. Weekly.
Journal of the New Afncan Literature and the Arts: Editor Joseph Okpaku, P.O. Box
4392, Stanford University, Stanford, California. Biannual. Literature and
criticism in English and French.
Legitime Defense: Single issue only, Paris, June 1932.
Presence Afncaine: Cultural Review of the Negro World: Editor Alioune Diop, 25 bis,
rue des Ecoles, Paris 5 . Quarterly. A French language journal which for
a time printed separate English and French editions of each issue, now has
articles in French and English.
Presence Francophone: Published by the University of Sherbrooke, Sherbrooke,
Quebec. Biannual. All French literatures. Started in 1970.
Research in Afncan Literature: Editor Bernth Lindfors, African and Afro-Ameri¬
can Research Institute, University of Texas, Austin. Biannual.
La Revue du Monde Non (1931-32). Edited by Dr. Leo Sajous and Mile Paulette
Nardal. Editions de la revue mondiale, 45, rue Jacob, Paris 6 . Six issues
appeared. Articles were printed in French and English in double columns.
Copies may be found in the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, How¬
ard University Library, Washington, D.C.
Tropiques: Cultural review. Fort-de-France, Martinique. Nos. 1-9, April 1941-
October 1943.
INDEX
Index
393
394 / INDEX
Ellison, Ralph, xiv French Guiana, xiv, 34, 83, 121, 232-34,
Elouard, Paul, 37, 193, 236, 258-59 280, 332
Esprit, 119 French Union, xx
Ethiopian Action Committee, 229 Freud, Sigmund, 15, 39, 41
Ethiopian war, 9, 229 Frobenius, Leo, xviii, 8, 11,94-95, 245-47
Ethnological Institute of Haiti, 27 Histoire de la civilisation afncaine, xvii, 93,
Ethnology, 8, 26-27, 93-101, 121, 245, 246
259, 302, 311, 327, 363 Full, Samba, 361
L'Etudiant Non, xviii, xix, 4, 11, 83-92,
202, 229, 235, 290-92, 305 Gandhi, 10
Europe, 246-47, 253, 261, 281-83, 287, Gauguin, Paul, 32
290-91,294, 296, 303, 316, 320, 322, Generations, conflict of, 351, 358
355, 358 George, Stefan, 42
Evembe, Francois, 358 Germany, 9, 42, 134, 142
Ewande, Daniel, Vive le president, 352 Ghana, xxv, 95-96, 280, 293
Exile, 246, 259, 350 Gibran, Khalil, The Prophet, 107
Exoticism, 29, 34, 339, 357 Gide, Andre, 4, 280, 285, 306
Glissant, Edouard, xx, 223, 238, 293, 294,
Fabre, Michel, 5
302-3, 305-6, 313, 315, 321, 324-25,
Fall, Malik, 353
329-31, 341, 350
Fanon, Frantz, xx, 53, 111-12, 115, 131,
La lezarde, xxii, 326, 339
238, 312, 321, 325-27, 343, 351
Soleil de la conscience, 327
Les damnes de la terre, xxii-xxiii, 4
Gobineau, Joseph Arthur de, xvii, 93, 96,
Peau noire, masques blancs, xvi, xxi, xxiii,
285
160, 359
Gogol, Nikolai, 306
Toward the African Revolution, 4
Fascism, 9, 150 Gold Coast, 96-97
Faubert, Ida, Coeur des lies, 25 Goldenberg, J. P., 4
Faulkner, William, 59, 306 Gologo, Mamadou, 351
Fetishism, 8, 88, 97, 131, 308, 311 Gongo Moussa, 197
First World Festival of Negro Arts, Dakar, Gratiant, Gilbert, 3, 20, 25-26, 28-29,
xx, xxix, 350 302-3, 309, 314, 350
Flaubert, Gustave, 107, 306 Credo des sang-mele, ou Je veux chanter la
Flavia-Leopold, Emmanuel, 20, 28 France, 32-33
Fodeba, Keita, 296, 308, 340 “Martinique totale,” 33-34
Poemes afncaines, 352 Griaule, G. Calame, 354
Folklore, xx, 26-27, 60, 69, 237, 250-53, The Tree Theme in West African Tales, 364
287, 289, 308, 311, 313, 326, 340, Griaule, Marcel, 11, 100, 285
352, 354-55, 361, 363 Griots, 26, 86, 197, 214-15, 340, 353, 355,
Fonlon, Bernard, 5 361, 363
Fontaine, xiv, 192 Guadeloupe, xiv, 30, 302, 332
Fort-de-France, 3, 17, 160, 236-37 Guerin, Daniel, Les Antilles decolomsees, 322
Fote, Memel, Les institutionspolitiques chez les Guiana. See French Guiana
Adjoukrou, 5, 364 Guillen, Nicolas, 4, 50, 293
France, xv, xx, 38, 53, 78, 84, 86, 95, 134, Guinea, xxi, 8, 293, 295, 332
142, 209, 211, 230-35, 237, 259, 263,
279-87, 290-91, 304, 306, 310, 325, Haiti, xiv, 3, 16, 21-24, 28, 34, 104, 164,
331-32, 336, 357, 359 233, 238, 291, 293-95, 297, 332
black students in, 9-11, 15-17, 52, 56- American occupation of, 26-27
74, 83, 92-93, 102-3, 120-21, 123, Hardy, Georges, L'art negre, xviii, 97-98
131, 143, 159, 162, 201-2, 204, Harlem renaissance, xiv, xxvii, 56-74
229, 233, 235, 260, 279-87, 289- Harris, Rodney, 5
90, 293, 296, 303, 311, 331, 360 Hazoume, Guy L., Ideologies tnbahstes et na¬
literature of, 88, 305-6, 313, 356-57 tions en Afnque, 4
France, Anatole, 38 Hazoume, Paul, 10, 281, 313, 325, 327
Thais, 357 Hegel, Georg, 112-13
Francophonie, xxvii Hemingway, Ernest, 59, 306
French Equatorial Africa, 78-79 Heredia, Jose Maria de, 21, 29-30
Index / 397
108, 131, 133, 150, 159-64, 166, Writers’ Congress for the Defense of Cul¬
176-80, 186-89, 193, 195-96, 202-3, ture, 83
229, 234, 238, 240-42, 245, 248, 250,
252-53, 254, 260, 282, 290-91, 293, Yacine, Kateb, 10
295, 302-4, 307, 309-11, 313, 316, Yanou, Etienne, 352
323-24, 336, 339, 341, 356 Yondo, Elolongue Epanya, 308, 314-15,
students from, in Paris, 9-10, 56-74, 323, 325, 351, 353
121, 235
Wheatley, Phyllis, 72 Zobel, Joseph, 53, 76, 238, 302-3, 309,
Wolofs, 98 313, 322, 325-26, 330, 350
World War I, 8, 59, 66 Diab'la, 296, 361
World War II, xix, 9, 194, 227-76 La rue Cases Negres, 72-73
Wright, Richard, 58-59, 73, 281, 292-93, Zola, Emile, 306
298-99, 307, 350 Zombi, 251