Fesman - Général
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| Aimé Césaire |
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La Négritude, a literary movement that was led by francophone black intellectuals, writers and politicians, commenced in French literature, in 1921 with the novel, Batouala, a true black work of fiction by René Maran (Albin Michel, Prix Goncourt 1921) and ended with African and Madagascan Independence in 1960. Aimé Césaire was an outstanding figure and a guiding light in the movement. This inventor of the neologism “negritude” was indeed the uncontested guardian of La Négritude’s literary temple in which Leopold Sedar Senghor was a great theoretician. Senghor who considered Césaire as “more than his brother” published L’Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache (Anthology of the New Black and Malagasy Poetry) in 1948 (Presses Universitaires de France) which became recognized as a manifesto of poetic negritude. Sixteen black poets born in different regions of the French colonial empire appeared in this anthology-manifesto: The Guyanan Leon-Gontran Damas (1912-1978); the Martinicans Gilbert Gratiant (1901-1985), Etienne Lero (1909-1939) and Aimé Césaire (1913-2008); The Guadeloupians Guy Tirolien (1917-1988) and Paul Niger (1917-1962); the Haitians Leon Laleau (1892-1979), Jacques Roumain (1907-1944), Jean-Fernand Briere (1909-1992), and René Belance (1915-2004); the Senegalese Birago Diop ( 1906-1989), Leopold Sedar Senghor (1906-2001) and David Diop (1927-1960); and the Madagascans Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo (1901-1937), Jacques Rabemananjara (1913-2005) and Flavien Ranaivo(1914-1999). Afterwards, they were rejoined by poets in La Négritude in the 50s generation namely Bernard Dadie from the Ivory Coast, the Congolese Martial Sinda, the Guinean Keita Fodeba, the Cameroonian Elongue Epanya Yondo, the Dahomean Paulin Joachim, the Senegalese Lamine Diakhate and a few others. When FESMAN was just starting to organise the festival, Aimé Césaire was the last surviving activist poet in La Négritude from the 40s generation. It was only natural that this defender of the black race (discredited by slavery and colonisation) and this humanist was chosen to host FESMAN 2009. It was the fervent wish of President Abdoulaye Wade who had planned to make a grand tour in the Caribbean with a stopover by choice and with great honour in Martinique to once again meet with Aimé Césaire who he had met for the first time in 1956 during the 1st Conference of Black Intellectuals and Artists organised in Sorbonne by the African Society of Culture presided by Alioune Diop. Aimé Césaire was pleased to host FESMAN III which in the greater realm of culture is just a small step towards a greater aspiration of building the United States of Africa. Yet destiny had decided otherwise and the Martinican baobab made that spiritual journey to rejoin his literary activist brotherhood, but not without having first received a FESMAN delegation led by Alioune Badara Beye. From a literary point of view, one remembers that Notebook of a Return to My Native Land (published in Volontés review 1939) was a powerful Cesairian speech in the defence of a Martinique rid of the slag of slavery and affirms his rediscovered identity once again bonded to Mother Africa. Hence, he, who Andre Breton (the Pope of Surrealism) held in esteem as a great black surrealist poet, wrote in Notebook of a Return to My Native Land in 1939: “And the ‘poor-old-Negro’ is standing up/the seated ‘poor-old Negro’/unexpectedly standing/upright in the hold/upright in the cabins/upright on the bridge/upright in the wind/upright under the sun/upright in the blood/upright and free […] and the great black hole wherein I longed to drown myself the other moon –that’s where I now long to fish out the baleful tongue of night in its lustral stillness!” (Copyright Présence Africaine Editions, 1956). This inventor of highly-charged words considered this language as “miraculous weapons” likely to reinvent a new world. Aimé Césaire knew how to build a solid bridge, still valuable today, between the West Indian Diaspora and Mother Africa in times past denied and, at long last, vivaciously rediscovered. His fraternal speech is coupled with a violent anti-colonialist speech to liberate the black people from the heavy yoke of French colonial domination. On this subject, men of goodwill are grateful to him for his commitment to serve the oppressed around the world, for each individual is always a part of the greater good. Reference Bibliography Poetry* Cahier d'un retour au pays natal, Revue Volontés n°20, 1939, Pierre Bordas 1947, Présence africaine, Paris, 1956. |
