{"id":5677,"date":"2010-06-21T00:00:39","date_gmt":"2010-06-20T22:00:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=5677"},"modified":"2010-06-02T01:22:53","modified_gmt":"2010-06-01T23:22:53","slug":"aime-cesaire-1913-%e2%80%93-2008-a-black-orpheus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2010\/06\/aime-cesaire-1913-%e2%80%93-2008-a-black-orpheus\/","title":{"rendered":"Aim\u00e9 C\u00e9saire: (1913 \u2013 2008) A Black Orpheus"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The Bridge of Beauty and Understanding<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/em><\/p>\n

Only the bridge of Beauty will be strong enough for crossing from the bank of Darkness to the side of Light <\/em>– Nicholas Roerich<\/p>\n

The United Nations General Assembly in resolution A\/RES.62\/90 has proclaimed the year 2010 as the International Year for the Rapprochement of Cultures \u201cto promote universal respect for, and observation and protection of, all human rights and fundamental freedoms.\u201d Cultures encompass not only the arts and humanities but also different ways of living together, value systems and traditions.\u00a0 Thus 2010 should provide real opportunities for dialogue among cultures.\u00a0 It is true that to an unprecedented degree people are meeting together in congresses, conferences and universities all over the globe. However, in themselves, such meetings are not dialogue and do not necessarily lead to rapprochement of cultures. There is a need to reach a deeper level.\u00a0 Reaching such deeper levels takes patience, tolerance, the ability to take a longer-range view, and creativity.\u00a0 Thus we are pleased to present the creative efforts of individuals who have helped to create bridges of understanding among cultures.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

<\/em><\/p>\n

Aim\u00e9 C\u00e9saire: (1913 \u2013 2008) A Black Orpheus <\/strong><\/p>\n

My negritude is not a stone,<\/em><\/p>\n

nor deafness flung out against the clamour<\/em><\/p>\n

of the day<\/em><\/p>\n

my negritude is not a white speck of dead water<\/em><\/p>\n

on the dead eye of the earth<\/em><\/p>\n

my negritude is neither tower nor cathedral.<\/em><\/p>\n

Return to My Native Land<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/em>Aim\u00e9 C\u00e9saire, the Matinique poet and political figure, was a cultural bridge builder between the West Indies, Europe and Africa. A poet, teacher, and political figure, he had been mayor of the capital city, Fort-de-France for 56 years from 1945 to 2001, and a member of the French Parliament without a break from 1945 to 1993 \u2014 the French political system allowing a person to be a member of the national parliament and an elected local official at the same time.\u00a0 First elected to Parliament as a member of the Communist Party, he had left the Party in 1956 when he felt that the Communist Party did not put anti-colonialism at the center of its efforts.<\/p>\n

The Communist Party\u2019s position was that colonialism would end by itself once the workers had come to power. C\u00e9saire went on to form a local political party which existed only in Martinique and was largely his political machine for creating municipal jobs.\u00a0 C\u00e9saire faced a massive rural to urban migration on the 400,000 person West Indian department of France. One answer to unemployment was to create municipal posts largely paid for from the central government budget \u2014 a ready pool of steady political supporters.\u00a0 C\u00e9saire also did much to develop cultural activities from his mayor\u2019s office\u2014 encouraging theatre, music and handicrafts.<\/p>\n

Aim\u00e9 C\u00e9saire\u2019s wider fame was due to his poetry and his plays \u2014 all with political implications, but heavily influenced by images from the subconscious.\u00a0 Thus it was that Andr\u00e9 Breton (1896-1966) writer and ideologue of the Surrealists saw in C\u00e9saire a kindred soul and became a champion of C\u00e9saire\u2019s writing. Breton had been interested in African art and culture, by its sense of motion, color and myth.\u00a0 Breton often projected his own ideas onto African culture seeing it as spontaneous and mystical when much African art is, in fact, conventional and material.\u00a0 Nevertheless, Breton, who spent some of the Second World War years in Martinique, was able to interest many French writers and painters in African culture.\u00a0 It was Breton who encouraged Jean Paul Sartre to do an early anthology of African and West Indian poetry \u2013Black Orpheus- <\/em>and to write an important introduction stressing the revolutionary character of the poems.<\/p>\n

Aim\u00e9 C\u00e9saire\u2019s parents placed high value on education \u2014 his father was a civil servant who encouraged his children to read and to take school seriously.\u00a0 Thus C\u00e9saire ranked first in his secondary school class and received a scholarship in 1931 to go to France to study at l\u2019Ecole Normale Sup\u00e9ri\u00e9ure \u2014 a university-level institution which trains university professors and elite secondary school teachers.\u00a0 He was in the same class with L\u00e9opold S\u00e9dar Senghor of Senegal and Leon Damas.\u00a0 They, along with Birago Diop also from Senegal, started a publication in Paris L\u2019\u00e9tudiant noir (<\/em>The Black Student) as an expression of African culture.\u00a0 One of C\u00e9saire\u2019s style in poetry was to string together every clich\u00e9 that the French used when speaking about Africa and turning these largely negative views into complements.\u00a0 Thus he and Senghor took the most commonly used term for Blacks ,N\u00e8gre, <\/em>which was not an insult but which incorporated all the clich\u00e9s about Africans and West Indians and put a positive light upon the term.\u00a0 Thus negritude <\/em>became the term for a large group of French-speaking Africans and French-speaking West Indians \u2013 including Haiti \u2013 writers.\u00a0 They stressed the positive aspects of African society but also the pain and agony in the experience of Black people, especially slavery and colonialism.<\/p>\n

In 1938, just as he finished his university studies, C\u00e9saire took a few weeks vacation on the coast of Yugoslavia.\u00a0 There he wrote in a burst of energy his Cahier d\u2019un retour au pays natal (<\/em>Notebook of the Return to My Native Land), his best known series of poems.\u00a0 In 1939, he returned to Martinique having married another teacher from Martinique who was also trained in Paris.\u00a0 Both started teaching at the major secondary school of Martinique and started being politically active.\u00a0 However, by 1940, Martinique was under the control of the Vichy government of France and political activity was firmly discouraged.\u00a0 Thus C\u00e9saire concentrated on his writing.\u00a0 He met Andr\u00e9 Breton who spent the war years in the USA. Breton encouraged an interest in the history and culture of Haiti.\u00a0 While Haiti is physically close to Martinique, Haitian history and culture is often overlooked \u2014 if not looked down upon \u2014 in Martinique.\u00a0 C\u00e9saire wrote on the Haitian independence leader Toussaint L\u2019Ouverture as a hero, and later a play in 1963 La Trag\u00e9die du roi Christophe<\/em> largely influenced by the early years of the dictatorship of Francois Duvalier.<\/p>\n

With the end of the Second World War, the French Communist Party had one third of the seats in the Parliament of the newly created Fourth Republic.\u00a0 The French Communists were looking for potential candidates from Martinique where the Party was not particularly well structured.\u00a0 They turned to young, educated persons who had a local base.\u00a0 C\u00e9saire, with his Paris education and as a popular teacher at the major secondary school fitted that bill. He was elected the same year both to Parliament and to the town hall.\u00a0 When in Paris, he took an active part in cultural life, especially with African students and young intellectuals.\u00a0 In 1947, along with the Senegalese Alioune Diop and Senghor, he founded the journal Pr\u00e9sence africaine <\/em>which later became also a publisher of books and the leading voice of the negritude movement.<\/p>\n

As the French Communist Party had a rule of tight party discipline, C\u00e9saire played no independent role in the French Parliament until he left the Party in 1956. However, his 1950 Discours sur le Colonialism, <\/em>at the same time violent and satiric became the most widely read anti-colonial tract of the times, calling attention to the deep cultural roots of colonial attitudes.\u00a0\u00a0 After 1956, most of his efforts in Parliament were devoted to socio-economic development for Martinique. His strong anti-colonial efforts were made outside Parliament, especially in the cultural sphere.\u00a0 Nevertheless, as a member of Parliament he could open doors that poets do not usually enter.<\/p>\n

C\u00e9saire, who read English well, was interested in the writings of Langston Hughes whose poems were close in spirit and style.\u00a0 He translated into French some of the poems of the Negro poet Sterling A. Brown.<\/p>\n

In the 1960s, C\u00e9saire turned increasingly to writing plays, especially on the history of Haiti, as the earliest independent State of the West Indies. These were verse plays as the actors\u2019 dialogue were nearly poems.\u00a0 As the French African colonies became independent in the 1960s, he stressed that the end of colonialism was not enough but that colonial culture had to be replaced by a new culture, a culture of the universal, a culture of renewal.\u00a0 \u201cIt is a universal, rich with all that is particular, rich with all the particulars that are, the deepening of each particular, the coexistence of them all.\u201d <\/em><\/p>\n

_________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/em><\/p>\n

Rene Wadlow , Representative to the U N, Geneva, Association of World Citizens and member of TRANSCEND.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The United Nations General Assembly has proclaimed the year 2010 as the International Year for the Rapprochement of Cultures. Thus we are pleased to present the creative efforts of individuals who have helped to create bridges of understanding among cultures.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[82],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5677","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-united-nations"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5677","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5677"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5677\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5677"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5677"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5677"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}