On Thursday, 17 April, the Martinique poet, activist, politician, and post-colonial theorist Aimé Fernand David Césaire died.

Césaire was a central figure in what can be considered the French version of the Harlem Renaissance. While in school at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand , he helped found L’Étudiant Noir (The Black Student), a literary journal dedicated to the cultivation of black pride and which also birthed the Négritude movement, a literary and political movement that sought the “affirmation that one is black and proud of it”. His most famous works are his book-length poem, Cahier d’un Retour au Pays Natal (Notes From a Return to the Native Land), and the essay, “Negro I am, Negro I Will Remain.” Thanks to Professor Black Woman, I also found excerpts from his play, Une Tempête (adapted from William Shakespeare’s The Tempest), which you should most definitely go and read.

Truth be told, I had meant to post this on Thursday, but it slipped my mind until I read this,

I believe that there should be canonical works. I believe that those works should be just that, CANONS. Open salvos in ” battles”designed to literally grapple and destroy and rebuild them . Text that lives an breathes and is on it’s feet, on it’s back, on it’s toes. How we take theory and make art. And how that is CONNECTED eternally through performance and history.

Most importantly how that performance is SPECIFICALLY and practically located in POC bodies and there interactions with personalizing and culturing various artforms , both intentionally and SIMPLY BY THEIR PRESENCE.

which, by coincidence, I feel perfectly sums up the life that Césaire led.

And so, I take the sad passing of a great artist and activist and choose to make the most positive I can out of it. I choose to renew my commitment to art, activism, and the life of the mind (not that it ever went anywhere, it’s more like renewing one’s wedding vows). I encourage those so inclined to do the same.

From Cahier d’un Retour au Pays Natal

ma negritude n’est pas une pierre, sa surdite ruee contre
la clameur du jour
ma negritude n’est pas une taie d’eau morte sur l’il
mort de la terre
ma negritude n’est ni une tour ni une cathedrale
elle plonge dans la chair rouge du sol
elle plonge dans la chair ardente du ciel
elle troue l’accablement opaque de sa droite patience.

my Negritude is not a stone, its deafness dashed against
the clamor of the day
my Negritude is not an opaque spot of dead water
on the dead eye of the earth
my Negritude is neither a tower nor a cathedral
it plunges into the red flesh of the soil
it plunges into the ardent flesh of the sky
it pierces opaque prostration with its upright patience

[cross-posted at The Unapologetic Mexican]