Aimé Césaire: The Bearable Lightness of Becoming

Extract

Allons, la vraie poésie est ailleurs. Come on, true poetry lies elsewhere.

—Suzanne Césaire

The Recent Death of AIMÉ Césaire has Been an Occasion for Extolling his Virtues As Venerable Patriarch, Founding Father, and sovereign artist. Even his fiercest critics have considered him a unique poet-politician worthy of being interred in the Pantheon by the French state. Members of the créolité movement, such as Raphael Confiant and Patrick Chamoiseau, hailed him as the “nègre fondamental” ‘foundational black man,’ who was also like the father of the Martinican people. Confiant reiterated his filial devotion as Césaire's “fils à jamais” ‘son forevermore,’ and Chamoiseau identified him as the “maître-marronneur” ‘master Maroon.’ This wave of adulation tends to emphasize the militant poet-politician that Césaire never quite was. He was arguably the founder neither of a nation nor of a people nor, for that matter, of a movement. While he coined the word négritude, he was less the founder of the negritude movement than was his contemporary Léopold Sédar Senghor, who set about creating a totalizing, biologically based ideology around the concept of negritude. Perhaps even more telling is his view of the Haitian leader Henry Christophe as tragically flawed because of Christophe's obsession with founding a people. The protagonist of the play La tragédie du roi Christophe (The Tragedy of King Christophe) is a heedless builder, so obsessed by the need to construct and to found that he destroys himself, leaving behind the massive stone ship of the Citadelle as his legacy.