Aimé Césaire

Aimé Fernand David Césaire was born in Basse-Pointe, Martinique, on the twenty-sixth of June 1913, the son of a schoolteacher in a rural village. He took his secondary education at the Lycée Schoelcher in Fort-de-France and his university degree at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris.

In Paris he met Léopold Sédar Senghor and Léon Damas. The three founded L'Étudiant noir in 1934 — the journal in which the word Négritude first appeared, in an essay by Césaire. The movement that took its name from his coinage would shape Black cultural politics for the rest of the twentieth century.

His major works were the long poem Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, 1939, expanded 1947) — the foundational text of Négritude poetry, in which the word négritude makes its first published appearance — and the political pamphlet Discourse on Colonialism (1950), which connected European colonialism to European fascism: "Colonization works to decivilize the colonizer, to brutalize him in the true sense of the word." The argument anticipated by a generation the Holocaust-as-colonial-blowback analysis later associated with Hannah Arendt.

He served as mayor of Fort-de-France for fifty-six years (1945-2001), as deputy to the French National Assembly for forty-eight years, and authored the 1946 law that converted Martinique, Guadeloupe, French Guiana, and Réunion from colonies into French departments — an act critics have seen as falling short of full sovereignty but that he defended as having delivered material conditions to the islands that independence had not delivered elsewhere in the Caribbean.

He died in Fort-de-France on the seventeenth of April 2008, age ninety-four. His funeral was a state ceremony, attended by the French president and broadcast across the Caribbean.

He is honored here as the poet who coined Négritude and the statesman who governed an island for fifty-six years.