The Transformational and Enduring Vision of Aimé Césaire

Extract

As the Nineteenth Century was the Century of Colonization, The Twentieth Century was the Century of Decolonization, THE neologism entered popular usage during the 1950s, gained sudden prestige, and was declared crucial and, indeed, “beautiful” by Aimé Fernand David Césaire (“L'homme” 116). Césaire lived at the center of the global tempest and cultural sea change that characterized the anticolonial, civil rights, independence-movement years from 1932 to 1968. Césaire's rhetorical virtuosity and intellectual genius coincided with a moment of worldwide paradigm shifts and conceptual earthquakes, or tremblements de concepts, as he termed them (“Culture” 453). Césaire embodied what Edward Said called the “sensuous particularity as well as historical contingency” of a man living on the borderline of historical transition (39). On the actors, artists, and intellectuals of this borderline moment, the Senegalese writer Mariama Bâ reflected that it was the “[p]rivilège de notre génération, charnière entre deux périodes historiques, l'une de domination, l'autre d'indépendance. Nous … étions porteurs de projets” ‘privilege of our generation to be the link between two periods in our history, one of domination, the other of independence. We … were the messengers of a new design’ (Une si longue lettre 40 [So Long a Letter 25]). According to Césaire, the messengers had duties:

Notre devoir d'hommes de culture, notre double devoir est là: Il est de hâter la décolonisation, et il est, au sein même du présent, de préparer une bonne décolonisation, une décolonisation sans séquelles. Il faut hâter la décolonisation, qu'est-ce à dire? Cela veut dire qu'il faut, et par tous les moyens, hâter le mûrissement de la PRISE DE CONSCIENCE POPULAIRE sans quoi il n'y aura jamais de décolonisation. Nous dans la conjoncture où nous sommes, nous sommes des propagateurs d'âmes, des multiplicateurs d'âmes, et à la limite des inventeurs d'âmes. (“L'homme” 121)

Our responsibility as intellectuals, our double responsibility, is the following: it is to hasten decolonization, and it is at the very present time to prepare a sound decolonization, a process of decolonization that leaves no posttraumatic scars. What exactly does it mean that we must hasten decolonization? It means that we must by every means available to us hasten the maturation of the RAISING OF THE MASSES' CONSCIOUSNESS, without which there will be no decolonization. In our present situation we are propagators of souls, multipliers of souls, and almost inventors of souls.