(1913- ) poet, teacher,playwright, politician
Aime Cesaire was born into a family of seven children in Basse-Pointe, Martinique. Cesaire’s father worked as an accountant for the colonial internal-revenue service, and his mother was a seamstress. After earning a scholarship in 1924, Cesaire left his local elementary school to attend the Lycee Schoelcher in Fort-de-France, the capital of Martinique. There Cesaire met classmate Leon Damas, who later contributed to negritude, and instructor Octave Manoni, whose theories of colonization Cesaire later critiqued.
The top student at Lycee Schoelcher in 1931, Cesaire earned a scholarship to Paris’s prestigious Lycee Louis-le-Grand. There Cesaire read widely, including the works of Marx, freud, and the precursors of surrealism, lautreamont and rimbaud. With Leopold Sedar senghor, head of the African students, and Damas, Cesaire published L’Etudiant Noir (The Black Student) in 1934 “for all black students, regardless of origin.” Now considered the cofounder of negritude with Senghor, Damas claimed that Cesaire first used the word negritude in a L’Etudiant Noir editorial. The small student newspaper appeared five or six times during the next two years until funding difficulties and French authorities stopped publication.
After taking and passing entrance exams to L’E-cole Normale Superieure in 1935, Cesaire went to Yugoslavia with classmate Peter Guberina. A visit to Martinska, or St. Martin’s Island, contributed to notes which became Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (Return to My Native Land), published in 1939, near the time Cesaire became a teacher of classical and modern literature at the Lycee Schoelcher. Themes of black West Indian identity run through this and subsequent works, including Tropiques, a quarterly journal founded in 1941 with his wife Suzanne and other Martinican intellectuals. Reading Cahier d’un retour au pays natal prompted Andre breton to publish “Un grand poete noir” in a 1943 New York-based French-English review. This essay served as the preface to subsequent editions of the original text.
Cesaire lived in Haiti and lectured on French poetry after the Provisional French government, which took over in 1943, sent him there as a cultural ambassador. Working in Haiti gave Cesaire enough material to write a celebratory historical study on Haiti and his first play written for the stage, La Tragedie du roi Christophe (The Tragedy of King Christophe, 1963). The play draws on the life of Henri Christophe, one of Haiti’s earliest leaders, and employs Shakespearean style and tone.
In 1945 Cesaire became Mayor of Fort-de-France on a Communist ticket and the following year was the deputy for Martinique in the French National Assembly. In response to criticism of his critiques of French government, Cesaire published Discours sur le colonialisme (Discourse on Colonialism, 1950). The pamphlet critiques racist tendencies in French government and “universal” values based on white civilization, and it calls for political change.
Cesaire continued combining literary endeavors with political activism. The surrealistic style of his poetry prompted praise from Jean-Paul sartre and criticism from Communist Party members, who called it “decadent.” Frustrated with attitudes and actions of the French Communist Party, which Cesaire accused of “empire building” in the Third World in a Lettre a Maurice Thorez (Letter to Maurice Thorez), Cesaire founded the Martinican Progressive Party in 1958.
Plays published during the 1960s caused some to consider Cesaire one of the leading black dramatists of French expression. Une saison au Congo (A Season in the Congo, 1966) focuses on the demise of Congolese premier Patrice Lumumba and was not as well received by critics or audiences as Cesaire’s first play, La Tragedie du roi Christophe. Cesaire’s radical adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest as Une tempete (A Tempest, 1969) focuses on the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized and uses modern language and three acts instead of five. Une tempete initially generated much negative commentary by Western critics but was well received by international audiences when performed.
The younger generation of Martinican writers, including Bernabe, chamoiseau, and Confiant, disagree with Cesaire’s allegiance to writing black literature in French. As Ernest Moutoussamy remarks in Aime Cesaire, Depute a l’Assemblee Na-tionale, 1945-1993 (1993), “His poetic discourse is that of a prophet, his political discourse is that of a realist and as such makes room for compromise.”
Other Works by Aime Cesaire
Aime Cesaire: The Collected Poetry. Translated by Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983.
Lyric and Dramatic Poetry, 1946-82. Translated by Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith. Char-lottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1990.
Works about Aime Cesaire
Davis, Gregson. Aime Cesaire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Hale, Thomas, ed. Critical Perspectives on Aime Ce-saire. Washington, D.C.: Three Continents Press, 1992.
San Juan, E. Aime Cesaire: Surrealism and Revolution. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Press, 2000.
