Homage to Aimé Césaire

On the 23rd of June 2006 I arrived in Fort de France to celebrate Aime Césaire's 93rd birthday. Visiting the beautiful island of Martinique, and meeting her celebrated son filled me with a deep sense of joy.

The 22nd of July 2006 will remain one of the most important days of my professional life, a gilded moment in one's lifetime.

Césaire, to borrow his characterization of Haiti:...where negritude stood up... was negritude standing up, as unique as the slaves' victory over their master. He was both the uniqueness and the universality of the black experience.

The universality of the black experience is particularly critical to the current discourse on human rights, especially when one considers that negritude is in essence a revolt against the specific conditions facing black people everywhere; oppressed, shunned, victimized, as expressed by the likes of Rimbaud in Abyssinia. It is through this expansive lense that we understand Césaire's negritude. At the end Toussaint Louverture we read: Toussiant demonstrated that there is no pariah race; that there is no marginal country; that there is no special nation of people. The aim was to emphasize and give force to a principle. In the struggle for human rights, Louverture was an advocate for all blacks, and this is his true legacy. Toussaint Louverture fought to concretise the rights of man and for this reason the slave revolt of Santo Domingo is inscribed in the history of human civilization.

Beyond his poetry, Césaire contributed ideas that provide us with a basis for the struggle for protection and advancement of human rights.

How do Césaire's ideas resonate in Brazil?

Eminent scholars have distinguished between the different forms that negritude has taken; the insurrectionist, the intellectual, Cesairian, Haitian, black-American in the tradition of Marcus Garvey, or Malcolm X, and even the religious, the rural, and the Brazilian.

In 1979 on the occasion of the First African Diaspora Studies Institute (FADSI) held at Howard University, St Clair Drake asked the question: Should black Brazilians be included in the broader pan-African network, or should their way of life and their more parochial form of negritude be granted its own legitimacy?

Roger Bastide addressed the same question at the end of his book Les Amériques noires (« les chemins de la négritude »), in which he makes a distinction between,a negritude that is lived, deeply rooted and rural, on the one hand, and that of the uprooted urban black proletariat, and intellectuals on the other.

Other scholars have noted the resurgence of a ritual and pan-Africanist negritude in the Afro-Brazilian religiosity and its spread to the United States

Besides the fact that Brazil is to some degree the the foremost « African » country in the diaspora, in terms of size, resources, population, and the struggle for the rights of its black citizens, the country provides an important case study on negritude and pan-Africanism. It allows us to explore the different political cultures within these literary and political movements.

I also recall that during Rene Depestre's sojourn in Brazil during the 1950s, he was challenged by Césaire for having defended the formalist style of [Louis] Aragon. He refers to the Haitian revolution in the poem « le verbe marronner »:
« C‘est une nuit de Seine et moi je me souviens comme ivre du chant dément de Boukmann accouchant ton pays au forceps de l’orage ».

Césaire's collection of poems Noria, published in 1976 expresses his perception of Brazilian negritude, especially in Bahia. This perception stems from a particular Brazilian Africanness that does not preclude a direct connection to the founding fathers of Quilombos, not the least of whom was Zumbi de Palmares, the famous maroon. This national hero was a revolutionary in the vein of Toussaint Louverture.

In a seminal speech delivered at the CIAD (I) conference, professor Mamadou Diouf recalled that it was not until 1956 at the first Congress of Black Writers and Artists, that there were any Brazilian or even South American delegates at any major pan-African gatherings. The Brazilian writer Jorge Amado attended that famous meeting in Paris.

Meanwhile on the 22nd of February 2006, Elisa Larkin Nascimento, wife of Abdias do Nascimento sent me an email in which she emphasized the point that the spirit of negritude was always present in the work of her illustrious husband, ever since he founded the Black Experimental Theater (BET) in 1944. this is what she had to say:

...I would say that Leopold Senghor and his work on negritude occupy have historically had a major influence in our struggle. More recently, they have served as a significant reference point. Abdias do Nascimento, Gerreiro Ramos and the BET, were the main, if not the only voices that advocated negritude in Brazil in the 1940s and 50s, at a time when mere mention of the term evoked indignation and horror. It is true that the negritude they embraced adopted the Brazilian language and the particular reality of Afro-Brazilians. However the reference to the essential negritude movement was always present.

The official delegation to the World Festival of Black Arts excluded Abdias and the BET, instead sending white intellectuals to represent the country's Afro-Brazilians. You are no doubt familiar with the open letter Abdias addressed to the Festival and that was subsequently published by Alioune Diop in Présence Africaine. In some way the critique may have been biased by an ideological position that tended to ignore the specific African realities, as demonstrated by the experiences of pan-Africanists like George Padmore and CLR James.

We would sooner identify with the voice of Aime Césaire and Leon Gontran Damas than Senghor, because of some of the latter's political positions, especially his membership in the Académie Francaise, and vis-a-vis Cheikh Anta Diop. This is no doubt a simplistic take on what is in essence a more complex problem. Nonetheless, I hope it is useful...

This is just a personal view, but it clearly demonstrates how negritude was a wonder weapon for afro-descendant victims and their allies, faced with injustice, deprivation and both real and symbolic violence

My preoccupation is with the present form of this negritude, forged in resistance to all forms of discrimination, and human rights abuses... all human beings, be they Indian, European, black... we need to find political and institutional solutions. The work of the Special Secretariat of Policies for the Promotion of Racial Equality (SEPPIR) in Brazil , or even the Institut de Peuples Noirs in Burkina Faso is a good start. Could this work transform into an Institute for the people of Africa and the Diaspora in which the incandescent voice of our Osiris, Aime Césaire will echo through to all the immortals of the pan-Africanist movement

* Lazare KI-ZERBO
(Comité international Joseph Ki-Zerbo)
* Translated by Josh Ogada

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