(1927-1960) poet
David Diop was born in Bordeaux, France, to a Senegalese father on tour of duty and a Cameroonian mother. In his teens, he was deeply impressed by the poetry of Aime cesaire, the co-founder of negritude, an intellectual movement started by black students in Paris. These students were writers from the French colonies who celebrated the essence of being African while also criticizing colonialism and assimilation.
As a youth, Diop battled tuberculosis, spending months in hospitals. These solitary moments gave rise to many of his most tender poems. While attending high school, he met Leopold senghor, another founder of the Negritude movement, who later published some of Diop’s poems. Diop traveled between Africa and Europe, and many of his poems express a longing for a return to his ancestral land of Africa. In “Africa,” for example, he creates nostalgic images of Africa before colonialism, but this was an Africa with which he was not familiar. His only memories were of the aftermath of slavery and assimilation. When Senegal was close to gaining its independence in the late 1950s, Diop moved back to take part in the rebuilding of the country. His revolutionary poems and teachings were his tools of change. Ellen Kennedy, a Negri-tude historian, quotes Diop as writing that his poems were meant “to burst the eardrums of those who do not wish to hear.”
Unfortunately, Diop’s life came to a tragic end in a plane crash that also destroyed much of his last, unpublished work. Only 22 of his poems still exist; yet these clearly established him as a powerful contributor to the Negritude movement and to world literature.
Another Work by David Diop
Hammer Blows and Other Writings. Translated and edited by Simon Mpondo and Frank Jones. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973.
