Aimé Césaire is arguably the greatest Caribbean literary writer in history. Best known for his incendiary epic poem Notebook of a Return to My Native Land, Césaire reinvented black culture by conceiving ‘négritude’ as a dynamic and continuous process of self-creation.
In this essential new account of his life and work, Jane Hiddleston introduces readers to Césaire’s unique poetic voice and to his role as a figurehead for intellectuals pursuing freedom and equality for black people. Césaire was deeply immersed in the political life of his native Martinique for over fifty years: as Mayor of Fort-de-France and Deputy at the French National Assembly, he called for the liberation of oppressed people at home and abroad, while celebrating black creativity and self-invention to resist a history of racism.
Césaire’s extraordinary life reminds us that the much-needed revolt against oppression and subjugation can - and should - come from within the establishment, as well as without.
Table of Contents
IntroductionChapter One
1930s Paris and the Cahier d’un retour au pays natal: ‘It is beautiful and good and legitimate to be nègre’
Chapter Two
Wartime Martinique, Tropiques, and Les Armes miraculeuses: ‘Open the windows. Air. Air’
Chapter Three
Departmentalisation, Soleil cou coupé and Corps perdu: ‘I Shall Command the Islands to Exist’
Chapter Four
The Political Upheavals of the 1950s: ‘History I tell of the awakening of Africa’
Chapter Five
The Theatre of Decolonisation: ‘One does not invent a tree, one plants it’
Chapter Six
Political and Poetic Disillusionment: ‘I inhabit a Sacred Wound’
Afterword
