Aime Cesaire Quotes on Knowledge
Aimé Césaire (1913–2008), the Martinican poet, playwright, and politician who, with Senghor and Damas, founded the Negritude movement, gave Caribbean and African Francophone letters two of their most influential works in the Notebook of a Return to the Native Land (1939, definitive 1956) and the polemical Discourse on Colonialism (1950). The framework treats the recovery of Black knowledge — historical, cultural, and embodied — as inseparable from the political work of decolonization, with the corresponding case that the European philosophical and literary categories under which Black experience had been received in the colonial library require not gentle amendment but a sustained imaginative reconstruction from the side of the colonized themselves.
Quotes
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“What he cannot forgive Hitler for is not crime in itself, the crime against man, it is not the humiliation of man as such, it is the crime against the white man, the humiliation of the white man, and the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India, and the blacks of Africa.”
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“What am I driving at? At this idea: that no one colonizes innocently, that no one colonizes with impunity either; that a nation which colonizes, that a civilization which justifies colonization—and therefore force—is already a sick civilization, a civilization that is morally diseased, that irresistibly, progressing from one consequence to another, one repudiation to another, calls for its Hitler, I mean its punishment.”
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“Colonization, I repeat, dehumanizes even the most civilized man; that colonial activity, colonial enterprise, colonial conquest, which is based on contempt for the native and justified by that contempt, inevitably tends to change him who undertakes it; that the colonizer, who in order to ease his conscience gets into the habit of seeing the other man as an animal, accustoms himself to treating him like an animal, and tends objectively to transform himself into an animal. It is this result, this boomerang effect of colonization, that I wanted to point out.”
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“It is not the head of a civilization that begins to rot first. It is the heart.”
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“With the exception of Yugoslavia , in numerous European countries—in the name of socialism —usurping bureaucracies that are cut off from the people (bureaucracies from which it is now proven that nothing can be expected) have achieved the pitiable wonder of transforming into a nightmare what humanity has for so long cherished as a dream: socialism.”
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“I believe I have said enough to make it clear that it is neither Marxism nor communism that I am renouncing, and that it is the usage some have made of Marxism and communism that I condemn. That what I want is that Marxism and communism be placed in the service of black peoples , and not black peoples in the service of Marxism and communism.”
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