Aime Cesaire 1913 – 2008

Aime Cesaire was a Martinican poet, playwright, and philosopher and a co-founder of the Negritude movement. Studying in Paris in the 1930s alongside Leopold Senghor and Leon Damas, he articulated Negritude as the affirmation of black African and diasporic culture against the universal claims of European civilization. His Discourse on Colonialism is one of the foundational texts of anti-colonial theory, and his Notebook of a Return to the Native Land remains a touchstone of twentieth-century poetry. He served as mayor of Fort-de-France for fifty-six years and as a deputy in the French National Assembly.

Aime Cesaire was born in 1913 at Basse-Pointe in Martinique. After the Lycee Schoelcher in Fort-de-France he won a scholarship to the Lycee Louis-le-Grand and the Ecole normale superieure in Paris, where he met Leopold Sedar Senghor and Leon Damas and in 1935 helped found the journal L'Etudiant Noir, in which the term negritude first appeared. He returned to Martinique on the eve of the Second World War to teach at the Lycee Schoelcher.

His major works include the foundational long poem Notebook of a Return to the Native Land (Cahier d'un retour au pays natal, 1939, expanded 1947), the polemical Discourse on Colonialism (1950), the historical study Toussaint Louverture (1960), and the plays The Tragedy of King Christophe (1963) and A Tempest (1969). For more than half a century he was at the same time mayor of Fort-de-France (1945-2001) and deputy to the French National Assembly, founding the Parti Progressiste Martiniquais after his break with the French Communist Party in 1956.

Cesaire's negritude — a poetics and politics of black self-recognition against the violence of assimilation — and his unsparing analysis of colonial reason placed him at the origin of francophone postcolonial thought, alongside his former pupil Frantz Fanon. He died at Fort-de-France in 2008 and was honored with a state funeral and entry into the Pantheon by inscription.