Aimé Césaire

Poet and politician Aimé Césaire was born to working-class parents on the Caribbean island of Martinique, a French colony, where he excelled in school from an early age. This won him a scholarship to study in Paris, where he entered the prestigious École Normale Supérieure and befriended Léopold Sédar Senghor, an African student and poet who later became the celebrated first president of Senegal. In an attempt to assert the voices of students from France’s overseas colonies and denounce the pervasive racism he experienced in Paris, Césaire started a journal called L’Étudiant Noir (The Black Student). Its contributors included Senghor and Suzanne Roussi, another student from Martinique, who ended up marrying Césaire in 1937. Two years later, they returned to Martinique, where both of them taught at the prestigious Lycée Schœlcher, wrote prolifically in their spare time, and founded and edited the influential literary magazine Tropiques during World War II. The Césaires and the circle of intellectuals and acquaintances that formed around them used Tropiques to advance a Pan-African Marxist philosophy called Négritude and explore the implications of surrealist techniques in writing and art. Césaire’s first major work, the Notebook of a Return to the Native Land (Cahier d’un retour au pays natal), brought him to international prominence around the same time (although he had first published it years earlier, in 1939). As a teacher, Césaire also helped inspire Martinique’s two other most famous writers: the psychiatrist and activist Frantz Fanon and the literary critic Édouard Glissant. In 1945, hoping to help Martinique achieve independence or greater autonomy within the French colonial empire, Césaire decided to seek political office and was elected mayor of Fort-de-France, Martinique’s capital and largest city. During this time, he drafted a controversial law that helped Martinique receive the status of a department (which is similar to a state or province) but also solidified French control over the island. He initially associated with the French Communist Party, and it was during this period that he wrote the Discourse on Colonialism (1950). However, Césaire soon left the Communist Party, and in 1958 he founded the alternative Martinican Progressive Party. For the next half-century, Césaire continued to serve as Fort-de-France’s mayor and took on a variety of other political roles in Martinique and France, all while continuing to write plays, essays, and numerous volumes of poetry. Even after his retirement in 2001, he remained politically active (notably, by protesting a 2005 law that required French schools to teach about the so-called “positive values” of French colonialism). Césaire died of heart failure in 2008, but he remains a beloved and influential in Martinique as well as throughout France.