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The greatness of Aimé Césaire
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Aimé Césaire
From time to time there is an event so portentous that one breaks off from writing about more front-of-stage activities, to step back in wonder.
Such is the death at the age of 94 of the celebrated poet-politician from Martinique, who passed away on April 17 in his home island, where he was also buried. For the black world Aimé Césaire was one of the greatest figures of the twentieth century, and if he was not as well-known as he should be outside the French-speaking world, in time he will become so. There was a wide coverage in the US newspapers of his death, as translations of his works have had a considerable audience with African Americans.
His two most significant works - the long surrealist-influenced poem published in 1939, Cahier d'un Rétour au Pays Natal (Return to My Native Land), and his 1956 essay ‘Discourse on Colonialism’ are both powerful masterpieces of their genre, and will have a permanent place in the history of the black race.
The Négritude movement which he founded in the 1930s with his slightly older contemporary of the Paris Left Bank, Leopold Sédar Senghor, who later became President of Senegal. It was Césaire who invented the word Négritude, to describe the revolutionary black aesthetic that was a great intellectual rally cry responding to the dominance of French assimilation theories of the period, even if it was Senghor who gave it greater popular currency.
Political engagement
Yet it is not his writing and thinking alone that accounts for his stature, even if his long political career never achieved the international heights of Senghor. It was the way Césaire used theory and art to inform his own activism that still impresses, even as it evolved with time. He became a Communist during the war, after he had returned to Martinique, because he felt the Communists had been the most unambiguous backers of the resistance. But later he rejected the party in the 1950s because of the legacy of Stalinism. He formed his own leftist party the Progressive Party of Martinique (PPM) in 1958 and was elected Mayor of Fort-de-France, a position he held until 1993, after which he was made honorary Mayor, a measure of the esteem in which he was held. Paradoxes abound in his career. Although he was a great critic of colonialism and European racial arrogance, he had been in 1945 one of the main architects of the system of departmentalisation which still holds sway in the three overseas departments in the Caribbean of Martinique, Guadeloupe and Guyane, and the Indian Ocean island of Reunion. Till today their small independence movements have never been able to break the hold that French money has had on the middle classes through what has sometimes been called "consumer colonialism".
Pragmatism and Radicalism
When I met him for an interview in West Africa in the early 1970s in the Left Bank apartment he used while still a deputy in the French National Assembly, it was his mix of mild-mannered pragmatism and the brilliant way he marshalled often very radical ideas that I can still remember. For example, he acknowledged that in politics you can only go as fast as the people will go, and in the case of Martinique the people were still very far from being persuaded that the independence that by then had been obtained by most of the English-speaking islands in the Caribbean was something for them. In basic terms, they were the captives of the French. At the same time he had lost none of his clear-sighted view of the black man's struggle in the world, and was particularly interested in understanding the Black Panthers' movement at that time making waves in the US. It was a radicalism that never left him. From the burning emotion of the poetry in the Cahier in the 1930s, to the Discours of 1956, there is a timeless universality in his adoption of the literature of protest that still resonates today. Beginning with the text "Europe is indefensible" it is even now powerful reading matter, especially the magisterial sentence in the middle of the essay, where he advises his 'comrade' with a coruscating long list of who might be considered enemies, from "sadistic governors and greedy bankers" through "chattering intellectuals born out of the thigh of Nietzsche" to "the lovers of exoticism, the dividers, the agrarian sociologists, the hoodwinkers, the hoaxers, the hot-air artists, the humbugs…" We should not forget that Franz Fanon was one of his pupils when he was teaching in Martinique in the 1940s.
Refusing Sarkozy
Up to the ends Césaire was still not afraid of making a political stand, for reasons of intellectual honesty and consistency. In December 2005, in his capacity as Honorary Mayor, he refused to meet the then French Minister of the Interior, who happened to be one Nicolas Sarkozy, who was then obliged to cancel a visit to Martinique. The reason was the notorious Law of 23 February 2005 (passed by the national assembly in which Sarkozy's party, the UMP, had the majority), which stated that the curriculum in French schools should include recognition of "the positive role of the French presence abroad, including north Africa."
This had caused particular offence in Algeria, which had fought an eight-year war against that very French presence, and the law was described by President Bouteflika as "mental blindness, marked by negationism and revisionism". The whole French left was up in arms on the issue, but it was Césaire's quiet but firm 'Non' that has remained in the memory. He said at the time that he had made his decision as "author of the Discours sur le Colonialisme, and as a resolute anti-colonialist. I could not appear to support either the spirit or the letter of the law of February 23". Césaire may well have influenced the decision in January 2006 of President Jacques Chirac to abrogate the offending part of the law the following January, a remarkable victory for its opponents.
Principles at a funeral
The fact that it was Sarkozy who was involved in this skirmish gives the events surrounding Césaire's funeral in Martinique last month, particular piquancy. Sarkozy, now President, first decided that the writer should have a National Funeral (only the fourth writer in French history, after Victor Hugo, Paul Claudel, and Colette, to do so). He then decided to attend the funeral in Fort-de-France, with a huge contingent of ministers, almost matched by the phalanx from the Socialist Party (Segolène Royal, Francois Hollande and three former Prime ministers). Such a displacement of the French political class was probably only last seen at the 1994 funeral of Houphouët-Boigny in Yamoussoukro. (One commentator said it was perhaps because of guilt that virtually no-one attended Senghor's funeral in Dakar in 2001). Though Sarkozy paid his tribute with extravagant praise, he was not permitted to speak at the funeral itself by the Césaire family, who also declined the suggestion, made by the Socialist leadership, that the great man's remains should be buried in the Pantheon in Paris, saying he would not have wished it. Thus did he speak clearly from beyond the grave, remaining true to his principles.
A pile of rocks
The Césaire/Sarkozy two-stage confrontation has even more power when one realises the affront in Africa caused by Sarkozy's speech in Dakar in July 2007, when he used his first visit to Africa after becoming president to lecture Africans about their lack of advancement. He tried to make amends when he was in South Africa in February, (apparently on the advice of all the French ambassadors in Africa, who reported on the speech's negative effect). Sarkozy told parliament in Cape Town that "Africans had had enough of moral lessons" without adding, "like the one I gave in Dakar".
But there is something that belongs almost to classical drama in this clash between a principled nonagenarian, and a reckless opportunist forty years his junior - a pygmy alongside a giant. In an interview at the time Césaire reflected mournfully "Such a long combat to arrive at this. It was not very serious of them. Evidently they must be saying: all that for a pile of rocks in the Atlantic.”
His two most significant works - the long surrealist-influenced poem published in 1939, Cahier d'un Rétour au Pays Natal (Return to My Native Land), and his 1956 essay ‘Discourse on Colonialism’ are both powerful masterpieces of their genre, and will have a permanent place in the history of the black race.
The Négritude movement which he founded in the 1930s with his slightly older contemporary of the Paris Left Bank, Leopold Sédar Senghor, who later became President of Senegal. It was Césaire who invented the word Négritude, to describe the revolutionary black aesthetic that was a great intellectual rally cry responding to the dominance of French assimilation theories of the period, even if it was Senghor who gave it greater popular currency.
Political engagement
Yet it is not his writing and thinking alone that accounts for his stature, even if his long political career never achieved the international heights of Senghor. It was the way Césaire used theory and art to inform his own activism that still impresses, even as it evolved with time. He became a Communist during the war, after he had returned to Martinique, because he felt the Communists had been the most unambiguous backers of the resistance. But later he rejected the party in the 1950s because of the legacy of Stalinism. He formed his own leftist party the Progressive Party of Martinique (PPM) in 1958 and was elected Mayor of Fort-de-France, a position he held until 1993, after which he was made honorary Mayor, a measure of the esteem in which he was held. Paradoxes abound in his career. Although he was a great critic of colonialism and European racial arrogance, he had been in 1945 one of the main architects of the system of departmentalisation which still holds sway in the three overseas departments in the Caribbean of Martinique, Guadeloupe and Guyane, and the Indian Ocean island of Reunion. Till today their small independence movements have never been able to break the hold that French money has had on the middle classes through what has sometimes been called "consumer colonialism".
Pragmatism and Radicalism
When I met him for an interview in West Africa in the early 1970s in the Left Bank apartment he used while still a deputy in the French National Assembly, it was his mix of mild-mannered pragmatism and the brilliant way he marshalled often very radical ideas that I can still remember. For example, he acknowledged that in politics you can only go as fast as the people will go, and in the case of Martinique the people were still very far from being persuaded that the independence that by then had been obtained by most of the English-speaking islands in the Caribbean was something for them. In basic terms, they were the captives of the French. At the same time he had lost none of his clear-sighted view of the black man's struggle in the world, and was particularly interested in understanding the Black Panthers' movement at that time making waves in the US. It was a radicalism that never left him. From the burning emotion of the poetry in the Cahier in the 1930s, to the Discours of 1956, there is a timeless universality in his adoption of the literature of protest that still resonates today. Beginning with the text "Europe is indefensible" it is even now powerful reading matter, especially the magisterial sentence in the middle of the essay, where he advises his 'comrade' with a coruscating long list of who might be considered enemies, from "sadistic governors and greedy bankers" through "chattering intellectuals born out of the thigh of Nietzsche" to "the lovers of exoticism, the dividers, the agrarian sociologists, the hoodwinkers, the hoaxers, the hot-air artists, the humbugs…" We should not forget that Franz Fanon was one of his pupils when he was teaching in Martinique in the 1940s.
Refusing Sarkozy
Up to the ends Césaire was still not afraid of making a political stand, for reasons of intellectual honesty and consistency. In December 2005, in his capacity as Honorary Mayor, he refused to meet the then French Minister of the Interior, who happened to be one Nicolas Sarkozy, who was then obliged to cancel a visit to Martinique. The reason was the notorious Law of 23 February 2005 (passed by the national assembly in which Sarkozy's party, the UMP, had the majority), which stated that the curriculum in French schools should include recognition of "the positive role of the French presence abroad, including north Africa."
This had caused particular offence in Algeria, which had fought an eight-year war against that very French presence, and the law was described by President Bouteflika as "mental blindness, marked by negationism and revisionism". The whole French left was up in arms on the issue, but it was Césaire's quiet but firm 'Non' that has remained in the memory. He said at the time that he had made his decision as "author of the Discours sur le Colonialisme, and as a resolute anti-colonialist. I could not appear to support either the spirit or the letter of the law of February 23". Césaire may well have influenced the decision in January 2006 of President Jacques Chirac to abrogate the offending part of the law the following January, a remarkable victory for its opponents.
Principles at a funeral
The fact that it was Sarkozy who was involved in this skirmish gives the events surrounding Césaire's funeral in Martinique last month, particular piquancy. Sarkozy, now President, first decided that the writer should have a National Funeral (only the fourth writer in French history, after Victor Hugo, Paul Claudel, and Colette, to do so). He then decided to attend the funeral in Fort-de-France, with a huge contingent of ministers, almost matched by the phalanx from the Socialist Party (Segolène Royal, Francois Hollande and three former Prime ministers). Such a displacement of the French political class was probably only last seen at the 1994 funeral of Houphouët-Boigny in Yamoussoukro. (One commentator said it was perhaps because of guilt that virtually no-one attended Senghor's funeral in Dakar in 2001). Though Sarkozy paid his tribute with extravagant praise, he was not permitted to speak at the funeral itself by the Césaire family, who also declined the suggestion, made by the Socialist leadership, that the great man's remains should be buried in the Pantheon in Paris, saying he would not have wished it. Thus did he speak clearly from beyond the grave, remaining true to his principles.
A pile of rocks
The Césaire/Sarkozy two-stage confrontation has even more power when one realises the affront in Africa caused by Sarkozy's speech in Dakar in July 2007, when he used his first visit to Africa after becoming president to lecture Africans about their lack of advancement. He tried to make amends when he was in South Africa in February, (apparently on the advice of all the French ambassadors in Africa, who reported on the speech's negative effect). Sarkozy told parliament in Cape Town that "Africans had had enough of moral lessons" without adding, "like the one I gave in Dakar".
But there is something that belongs almost to classical drama in this clash between a principled nonagenarian, and a reckless opportunist forty years his junior - a pygmy alongside a giant. In an interview at the time Césaire reflected mournfully "Such a long combat to arrive at this. It was not very serious of them. Evidently they must be saying: all that for a pile of rocks in the Atlantic.”
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