Aimé Césaire 1913 - 2008

French Caribbean poet Aimé Césaire, 94, founding father of the "Negritude" movement that celebrated black consciousness, died in his native Martinique (French Carribean Island) on April 17, 2008.
Cesaire was born in 1913 in the small town of Basse-Pointe in Martinique. He married Suzanne Roussi in 1937, a gifted writer in her own right, with whom he had six children.
A graduate of the prestigious French Ecole Normale Superieure -- unusual for a black Martinican in the 1930s -- he remained a member of the French communist party until the Soviet Hungarian repression of 1956.
Césaire's anti-colonial rhetoric did not prevent him from having a long-lasting political career. After becoming mayor of Fort-de-France in 1945 at the age of 32, he was elected deputy of parliament a year later, a post he held until the early 1990s, in fact for almost half a century.
His writings offered insight into how France imposed its culture on its citizens of different origins in the early part of the 20th Century.
The theme still resonates in French politics today, as the country continues to struggle to integrate many of its residents of African and North African origin.
Césaire and African intellectual Leopold Sedar Senghor -- later president of Senegal -- founded "The Black Student" in 1934, a journal that encouraged people to develop black identity.


ANTI-COLONIAL VOICE IN THE 1960s
The Caribbean writer rose to fame with his Notebook of a Return to the Native Land (cahier d'un retour au pays natal) written in the late 1930s, in which he says "my negritude is neither tower nor cathedral, it plunges into the red flesh of the soil."
His poems expressed the degradation of black people in the Caribbean and describe the rediscovery of an African sense of self.
In his "Discourse on Colonialism," first published in 1950, Cesaire compared the relationship between the colonizer and colonized with the Nazis and their victims.
The negritude movement was a counterpart to the Black Pride movement in the United States, though it has been criticized for not being radical enough.

R-I-P, we need to have more people like him.