Césaire, Aimé(-Fernand)

(born June 25, 1913, Basse-Pointe, Martinique) French-speaking African poet and playwright, cofounder with Léopold Sédar Senghor of Negritude, an influential movement to restore the cultural identity of black Africans.

Together with Senghor and others involved in the Negritude movement, Césaire was educated in Paris. In the early 1940s he returned to Martinique and engaged in political action supporting the decolonization of the French colonies of Africa. In 1945 he became mayor of Fort-de-France, capital of Martinique, and the following year, a deputy for Martinique in the French National Assembly. Viewing the plight of the blacks as only one facet of the proletarian struggle, he joined the Communist Party (1946–56). He found that Surrealism, which freed him from the traditional forms of language, was the best expression for his convictions. He voiced his ardent rebellion in a European language heavy with African imagery. In the fiery poems of Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (1939; Return to My Native Land) and Soleil cou-coupé (1948), he lashed out against the oppressors.

Césaire turned to the theatre, discarding Negritude for black militancy. His tragedies are vehemently political: La Tragédie du Roi Christophe (1963; The Tragedy of King Christophe), a drama of decolonization in 19th-century Haiti, and Une Saison au Congo (1966; A Season in the Congo), the epic of the 1960 Congo rebellion and of the assassination of the Congolese political leader Patrice Lumumba. Both depict the fate of black power as forever doomed to failure.