Discourse On Colonialism (2000)

DISCO
ON
COLONIALISM
TRANSLATED
C E
B V^'-UQ
AN
R E
PINKHAM
NEW INTRODUCTION BY R O BlI P^P Q KELLEY

"A P O E T C S
F A N T C 0"fO N A L S M"
.
DISCOURSE ON COLONIALISM
Aime
Cesaire
Translated by Joan
Pinkham
A POETICS OF ANTICOLONIALISM
by Robin D. G. Kelley
MONTHLY REVIEW
NEW YORK
PRESS
Copyright 1972, 2000 by Monthly Review Press

All Rights Reserved
Originally published as Discours sur
Copyright
1955 by Editions
colonialisme
le
by Presence Africaine,
Presence Africaine
Library of Confess Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Cesaire Aime.
[Discours sur
le
colonialisme. English]
Discourse on colonialism
Aime
Cesaire; translated
A poetics of anticolonialism / Robin D.G.

cm.
p.
Contents:
by Joan Pinkham.
Kelley.
A poetics of anticolonialism
Discourse on colonialism
Aime
Cesaire
Robin D.G. Kelley
An
interview with
Aime
Cesaire
Rene Depestre.
ISBN 1-58367-025-4
1.
Colonies.
2.
(pbk.)
Colonies
Poetics of anticolonialism.
JV51 .C4 13 2000

325'.3 dc21
II.
ISBN 1-58367-024-6
Âfrica.
3.
Postcolonialism.
Title: Poetics
(cloth)
I.
Kelley,
of anticolonialism.
III.
Robin D.G.
Title.
00-020238
CIP
Monthly Review
Press
122 West 27th Street
NewYork,
Printed in
10
NY
10001
Canada
9876543
[ Contents ]
Robin D.G. Kelley
Aime
Cesaire
29
Rene Depestre
AN INTERVIEW WITH AIME
Notes
CfiSAIRE
79
95
'
[Introduction ]
Robin D.G. Kelley
Aime Cesaire's Discourse on

a- declaration
of war.
-.1.
Colonialism might be best described as
^
^
^ ^
would almost call it a "third world manifesto,"
'
but hesitate because

bereft
it is
primarily a polemic against the old order
of the kind of propositions and
accompany
its
age just as
Marx and
earlier in their little manifesto. First
Discours sur
It
^^
le
colonialisme,
it
appearedjust
Engels did
published in 1950 as
as the
old empires were
on the verge of collapse, thankshi ^rt to a world war a gainst fascism

that^left
^^
manifestos. Yet, Discourse speaks in revolutionary ca-
dences, capturing the spirit of
102 years
proposals that generally
Eurqpejn
material, spiritual,
and philosophical shambles.
was the age of decolonization an3 revolt in Africa, Asia, and Latin
America. Five years
earlier, in
1945, black people from around the
globe gathered in Manchester, England, for the Fifth Pan-African
Congress to discuss the freedom and future ofAfrica. Five years later,
in 1955, representatives
from the Non-Aligned Nations gathered in
^
\
'^
^
'<
^^
^^
-^
o^
Bandung, Indonesia, to discuss the freedom and future orthe third

world. Mao's revolution in China was a year old, while th^
Mau
Mau
their
in
Kenya were
just gearing
Tunisia, Morocco,
X once
insurrections in Algeria,
Minh at Dien
India, the Philippines,
suffered a
Bien Phu. Revolt was
Guyana, Egypt, Guatemala, South
Africa, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia,
Malcolm
an uprising against
Cameroon, and Madagascar, and
humiliating defeat by the Viet

air.
for
The French encountered
colonial masters.
in the
up
Harlem, you name it. Revolt!
described this extraordinary
moment,
War
decade from the end of the Second World
this
long
to the late 1950s,
wave of color."
as a "tidal
Discourse on Colonialism
this "tidal
is
indisputably one of the key texts in
wave" of anticolonial
postwar period
literature
^works that include
produced during the
W.E.B.
Du
Bois's Color
and
Democracy (1945) and The World andAfrica (1947), Frantz Fanon's

Black Skin, White Masks (1952), George Padmore's Pan-Africanism
or
Communism?: The Coming
Struggle for Africa (1956), Albert
Memmi's The Colonizer and the Colonized {1957), Richard Wright's

White
Man
Listen! (1957), Jean-Paul Sartre's essay, "Black
pheus" (1948), and journals such

Revolution. Like
Or-
as Presence Africaine 2ind African
much of the radical literature produced during this
epoch. Discourse places the colonial question front and center.
Although Cesaire, remaining somewhat

affiliation,
never quite dethrones the
modern
exalted status as a revolutionary force, the

is
practically invisible.
on the
colonized,
civilization itself,
finest
on
This
is
culture,
true to his
history,
proletariat
its
class
colonialisnri,^tsjmpact
on the very concept of
and most importantly, on the
Hegelian fashion, Cesaire demonstrates
works to
from
European working
book about
on
Communist
colonizer. In the
how
colonialism
"decivilize" the colonizer: torture, violence, race hatred,
ROBIN
D.G.
KELLEY
an d immorality consti tute a dead weight on the so-called
civilized,
pulling the master class deeper and deeper into the abyss of barbarism'i
The
instruments of colonial power rely on barbaric, brutal
violence and intimidation, and the end result
is
the degradation of
Europe itself Hence Cesaire can only scream: "Europe is indefensible."
Europe
sition that
is
also
dependent. Anticipating Fanon's famous propo-
"E urope
literally
is
the creation of the Third World,"
Cesaire reveals, over and over again, that the colonizers' sense of
superiority, their sense
on turning
of mission
as the world's civilizers,
the Other into a barbarian.
The Africans,
depends
the Indians,
the Asians cannot possess civilization or a culture equal to that of

the imperialists, or the latter have
no purpose, no
and domination of the
the exploitation
justification for
of the world. The
rest
colonial encounter, in other words, requires a reinvention of the
colonized, the deliberate destruction of the past
^what Cesaire calls
"thingification." Discourse, then, has a double-edged meaning:
Cesaire's discourse
colonialism,
and
on
it is
the explosion of work
the material and spiritual havoc created by
a critique of colonial discourse. Anticipating
we now call
critique of figures such as
"postcolonial studies," Cesaire's
Dominique O. Mannoni, Roger Caillois,
Ernest Renan, Yves Florenne, and Jules Romains,

reveals
racial
how
it is
among
others,
an ideology of
the circulation of colonial ideology^
and cultural hierarchy3-;4s asessential to colonial rule as police
and corvee
labor.
Surprisingly,
few assessments of postcolonial criticism pay much
attention to Discourse, besides mentioning
it
ing" works without bothering to elaborate
in a litany of "pioneer-
on
its
contents. Robert
Young's White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (1990)

dates the origins of postcolonial studies to Fanon's Wretched of the
Earth, despite the fact that
some of the arguments
in
Fanon were
10
On the other hand, Uterary critics tend
already present in Discourse.
to skip over Discourse or dismiss
It
an anomaly born of Cesaire's
as
member of
eleven-year stint as a
Martinique.
it
Communist
the
has been read in terms of whether
breaks from "Marxist orthodoxy."
want
Party of
conforms to or
it
to suggest that Discourse
made some critical contributions to our thinking about colonialism,

fascism,
and revolution.
First, its recasting
of the historôfWestem
Civilization helps us locate the origins of fascism within col onialism^

itself;
hence, within the very traditions of humanism,
critics
believed
fascism threatened. Second, Cesaire was neither confused about
Marxism nor masquerading
On the contrary,
as a
he was attempting to
of his predecessors such
W.E.B.
as
when he wrote
Marxist
revise
Marx,
Du Bois
the
li ngs,
the proletarian
movement of the
revolution as the fundamental historical

implications are enormous: the
al ong
and M.N. Roy, by
suggesting that the^nticolonial^truggleû^^
The
Discourse.
period.
coming revolution was not
posed in terms of capitalism versus socialism (the very last paragraph

notwithstanding, but
we
shall return to this later),
but in terms of
(me complete and total overthrow of a racist, colonialist system that

\ would open the way to imagine a whole new world.
What such a world might look like is never spelled out, but that
brings me to the final point about Discourse: it shoujdjye^read as a
surrealist text,
perhaps even an unintended synthesis of Cesaire's
understanding of poetry
(via
of historical materialism. For
Rimbaud)
all
as revolt
and
his revision
of his Marxist criticism and Negri-
tudian assertion, Cesaire's text plumbs the depths of one's unconscious so that colonialism
entire being. It
is
full
might be comprehended throughout the
of flares,
a solution or a strategy or a
quotes.
It is
full
of anger,
manual or a
a dancing flame in a bonfire.
full
little
of humor.
red
book
It is
not
with pithy
ROBIN
D.G.
KELLEY
1 1
odd...
Ai me
Câirg^s credentials as colonial
was born on June 26, 1913
in the small
Martinique where he, along with
impeccable.
He
town of Basse-Pointe,
were raised by a
five siblings,
mother who was a dressmaker, and a

local tax inspector.
critic are
father
who
held a post as the
Although their father was well educated and they
shared the cultural sensibilities of the petit bourgeois, the Cesaires

nonetheless lived close to the edge of rural poverty.
Aime turned out
to be a brilliant, precocious student and, at age eleven,
was admitted
There he met Leon-
to the Lycee Schoelcher in Fort-de-France.
Gontran Damas from Guiana, one of his childhood soccer-mates
(who would go on
and Senegalese poet
to collaborate with Cesaire
Leopold Sedar Senghor in launching the Negritude movement).

Cesaire graduated from the Lycee in
Latin, English,
and
not wait to leave
history.
Unlike
many of his colleagues, he could
home for the mother country
at ease in the Antillean world,"
during his eight-year stay in
Once
93 1 and took prizes in French,
he
recalled.
France. "I was not
That would change
Paris.
he enrolled
at the
Lycee Louis-le-Grand
to prepare for the grueling entrance
exams
to get into the Ecole
Normale
lectuals,
settled in Paris,
Superieure. There he
met
number of like-minded
intel-
most notably Senghor. Meeting Senghor, and another
Senegalese intellectual,
in Africa,
and
Ousman Soce, inspired in Cesaire an interest
their collaborations eventually gave birth to the
concept of Negritude. There were other black diasporic intellectual

circles in Paris at the time,
Nardal
sisters
notably the group surrounding the
of Martinique (Paulette, Jane, and Andree),
a salon out of which came La Revue du
Nardal and Leo Sajous. Another

consisting mainly of Etienne Lero,
and
Pierre
who
ran
monde noir, edited by Paulette
circle
of Martinican students,
Rene Menil, J.M. Monnerot,
and Simone Yoyotte, joined together
to declare their
12
commitment to
and only
issue
surrealism
and communist
revolution. In their
one
oi Legitime Defense, published in 1932, they excori-
ated the French-speaking black bourgeoisie, attacked the servility of
most West Indian

like
literature, celebrated several
black U.S. writers
Langston Hughes and Claude McKay, and denounced racism
(paying special attention to the Scottsboro case). Cesaire
about the Nardal

for his tastes.
sisters'
salon but found
knew
entirely "too bourgeois"
it
And though he had read Legitime Defense
he consid-
ered the group too assimilated: "There was nothing to distinguish
them
either
from the French
surrealists or the
poems were
In other words, their

Cesaire, Senghor,
colorless."
Leon Damas, and
different intellectual circle that centered
L'Etudiant
noir.
In
March 1935
its
French Communists.
were part of a
others,
around a journal
issue,
Cesaire published a
passionate tract against assimilation, in which he
term "Negritude."
It
is
Cesaire's piece appeared,
more
French and European humanities

entrance exams for the Ecole
their toll, for sure,
to
first
coined the
thaxL-iiQnic that at the
he was hard
at
called
work absorbing
moment
as much
as possible in preparation for his
Normale
Superieure.
The exams took
though the psychic and emotional costs of having
imbibe the very culture Cesaire publicly rejected must have
exacerbated an already exhausting regimen. After completing his
exams during the summer of 1935, he took a short vacation in

Yugoslavia with a fellow student. While visiting the Adriatic coast,
Cesaire was overcome with memories of home after seeing a small
island
on
from a
a long
distance.
poem about
Moved, he stayed up
the Martinique of his youth
people, the majesty of the place.
inquired about the
half the night working
little
next morning
he was told
when he
was
called Martinska.
to say the least; the
words he penned
island,
A magical chance encounter,
The
the land, the
it
ROBIN
D.G. KELLEY
13
that moonlit night were the beginnings of what would subsequently
become
his
most famous poem of
Cahier
all:
dun
retour
au pays
My Native Land). The next summer
natal {Notebook ofa Return to
he did return to Martinique, but was greeted by an even greater

sense of alienation.
He returned to France to complete his thesis on
African-American writers of the Harlem Renaissance and their

representations of the South,
and then, on July
10, 1937, married
Suzanne Roussy, a fellow Martinican student with
whom
he had
worked on L 'Etudiant noir.
The couple returned to Martinique in 1939 and began

in Fort-de-France. Joining forces with
Aristide
with the
Rene Menil, Lucie Thesee,
Maugee, Georges Gratiant, and
journal called Tropiques.

fall
others, they launched a
The appearance of
of France to the
fascist
teaching
Tropiques coincided
Vichy regime, which conse-
quently put the colonies of Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Guiana
under Vichy
his
rule.
The effect was startling; any illusions
comrades might have harbored about colorblind French broth-
erhood were shattered when thousands of French

the island. Their racism was blatant
James Arnold observed, "The

also
made
it
difficult for
were a colony
assimilation
like
and
direct.
insensitivity
of
sailors arrived
As
literary critic
this military
on
A.
regime
Martinicans to ignore the fact that they
any other, a conclusion that the
official policy
of
had masked somewhat. These conditions contributed
to radicalizing Cesaire
and
his friends, preparing
anticolonialist posture at the
end of the war." The
the regime to censor Tropiques

it
Cesaire and
was deemed
and
them
for a
official
more
policy of
interdict the publication
when
subversive also hastened the group's radicalization.
In a notorious letter dated
May
10, 1943, Martinique's
Chief of
Information Services, Captain Bayle, justified interdicting Tropiques

for being "a revolutionary review that
is
racial
and
sectarian." Bayle
14
accused the editors of poisoning the
spirit
and ruining the morale of the country.
penned a
brilliant
of society, sowing hatred
Two
days
later,
the editors
polemical response:
To
Lieutenant de Vaisseau Bayle:
Sir,
We have received your indictment of Tropiques.
"Racists," "sectarians," "revolutionaries," "ingrates
and
traitors to the
country," "poisoners of souls," none of these epithets really offends

us.
"Poisoners of Souls," like Racine,
good Country,"
like Zola,
"Ingrates
treamont. Racists, yes.
and
McKay and
Hitler,
As
Of the
traitors to
"Revolutionaries," like the
"Chatiments." "Sectarians," passionately,
Claude
and
like
our
Hugo
of
Rimbaud and Lau-
racism of Toussaint L'Ouverture, of
Langston Hughes against that of Drumont
to the rest of
it,
don't expect us to plead our case,
We
or to launch into vain recriminations, or discussion.
do not
S2eak_th_saiiiianguage
Signed:
Aime
Cesaire,
Suzanne Cesaire, Georges Gratiant, Aristide
Maugee, Rene Menil, Lucie Thesee.
But
in order for Tropiques to survive, they
their boldness, passing
it
as
and the
one of the most important and
in the world. Lasting
to
camouflage
off as a journal of West Indian folHoje.
Yet, despite the repressions
war
had
from 1941
ruses, Tropiques survived the
radical surrealist publications
to 1945, the essays
and poems
it
published (by the Cesaires, Rene Menil, and others) reveal the
evolution of a sop histicated anticolonial stance, as jwellasji vision^
of a postcolonial future. Theirs was a vision of freedom that drew
on Modernism and
a deep appreciation for pre-colonial African
modes of thought and practice;
it
drew on Surrealism as the strategy
of revolution of the mind and Marxism as revolution of the produc-
ROBIN
tive forces. It
all
of these
was an
and
15
out a position independent of
effort to carve
kind of wedding of Negritude, Marxism, and
forces, a
surrealism,
D.G. KELLEY
their collective efforts
would have
a profound
impact on international surrealism, in general, and on Andre

Breton, in particular. Tropiques also published Breton, as well as
texts
by
fact,
it
Benjamin
Pierre Mabille,
much
not too
is
surrealism's
most
Peret,
to proclaim
and other
surrealists.^^
Suzanne Cesaire
original theorists. Unlike critics
In
one of
as
who boxed
sur-
realism into narrow "avant garde" tendencies such as futurism or
cubism, Suzanne Cesaire linked
it
to broader
movements such
as
Romanticism, socialism, and Negritude. Surrealis m, she a rgued,
was not an ideology
such but a
as
state
of mind, a "permanent
readiness for the Marvelous." In a 1941 issue of Tropiques, she
imagined new
she called
on
possibilities in
readers to
marvelous and the

inclinations.
Here
embrace "the domain of the
fantastic, a
is
terms that were foreign to Marxists;

strange, the
domain scorned by people of certain
the freed image, dazzling
and
beautiful, with a
beauty that could not be more unexpected and overwhelming. Here

are the poet, the painter,
and the artist, presiding over the metamor-
phoses and the inversions of the world under the sign of hallucination
and madness."^ And

^
yet,
when
the Marvelous, she has her sights

tion,
on
she speaks of the
domina-
never forgetting the crushing reality of everyday
Martinique and the
rest
life
of the world. In "Surrealism and Us:
she writes with a boldness and clarity that

terize
domain of
the chains of colonial
would come
943,"
to charac-
her husband's Discourse on Colonialism:
Thus,
far
from contradicting,
tionary attitude toward
life,
diluting, or diverting our revolu-
surrealism strengthens
it.
It
nourishes an
impatient strength within us, endlessly reinforcing the massive
of refusals.
in
army
16
And I am
also thinking
of tomorrow.
Millions of black hands will fling their terror across the furious skies
of world war. Freed from a long benumbing slumber, the most

disinherited of all peoples will rise
Our
up from
plains of ashes.
surrealism will supply this rising people with a
very depths.
Our
punch from
its
surrealism will enable us to finally transcend the
sordid dichotomies of the present: whites/Blacks, Europeans/Africans, civilized/savages
mahoulis,
drawn
at last rediscovering the
directly
from
magic power of the
living sources. Colonial idiocy will be
purified in the welder's blue flame.
We shall recover our value as metal,

1
our cutting edge of steel, our unprecedented communions.
Although the influence of surrealism on Aime Cesaire has been

called into question recently, the question of his surrealism
is
usually
posed in terms of Andre Breton's influence on Cesaire. Surrealism

in this context
is
treated as
"European thought," and
like
Marxism,
considered foreign to non-European traditions. But this sort of

"diffusionist" interpretation leaves
Aime and Suzanne)
no room
for the Cesaires (both
to be innovators of surrealism, to have intro-
duced fresh ideas to Breton and his colleagues. I want to suggest that
the Cesaires not only embraced surrealism
Paris
Group,
might add
independently of
but opened new
vistas
the
and contributed
enormously to theorizing the "domain of the Marvelous."
Aime
Cesaire, after
As he explains
vided
me
accepted
has never denied his surrealist leanings.
in the interview
with what
it
all,
appended
here: "Surrealism pro-
had been confusedly searching
joyfully because in
it I
for.
have
have found more of a confir-
mation than a revelation." Surrealism, he explained, helped him

to
summon up
call to Africa.
powerful unconscious
said to myself:
it's
forces. "This, for
me, wasa
true that superficially
we
are
ROBIN
we
French,
find
is
KELLEY
17
we have been
rhetoric; but if we
then what we will
bear the marks of French customs;
branded by Cartesian philosophy, by French

break with
D.G.
that, if
all
we plumb
the depths,
fundamentally black." And, in another interview with
Jacqueline Leiner, he was even more enthusiastic about Breton's

role:
He
"Breton brought us boldness, he helped us take a strong stand.

cut short our hesitations and research.
realized that
he
^^
majo rity ofthe problems I encountered had already been resolved

by Breton and surrealism.
would
Breton was confirmation of what

saved us time,
extraordinary."
let
say that
had arrived
as a
meeting with
on
my own. This
at
The encounter was
us go quicker, further.
Furthermore, even
my
communist deputy
in
the later 1940s, Cesaire continued to publish poetry for surrealist

publications such as Le Surrealism en 1947, an exhibit catalogue
edited by
Andre Breton and Marcel Duchamp. His
imagery
undeniable in two poetry collections from that
is
Armes miraculeuses (Miraculous Weapons)

f<?w/>^'
in
surrealist
1944 and
era, Les
Soleil cou
(Beheaded Sun) in 1948.^^
Cesaire's essay, "Poetry
during
his
and Cognition," which he delivered
seven-month visit to Haiti in 1944, and which appeared
Tropiques the following year, represents one of his
statements
on
the revolutionary nature of poetry.
in
most systematic
Opening with
simple but provocative proposition that "Poetic knowledge
is
the
born
in the great silence of scientific knowledge," he then attempts to
why poetry is the only way to achieve the kind of

knowledge we need to move beyond the world's crises. C esaire 's
demonstrate
e mbrac e
of poetry
as a
obtaining the knowledge
method
of achieving clairvoyance, of
we need
to
move
forward,
understanding Discourse which appears just

y
is
crucial for
five years later. If we
think of Discourse as a kind of historical prose
poem
against the
/^
18
of colonialism, then perhaps we should heed Cesaire's point
realities
that
"What presides over the poem is not the most lucid intelligence,
the sharpest sensibility or the subtlest feelings, but experience as a
whole." This means everything, every history, every future, every
dream, every
pulse
is,
is
life
form, from plant to animal, every creative im-
plumbed from
the depths of the unconscious, jf poetry
inde ed, a powerful source of knowledge and revolt, one might
expect^Cesaite_to
employ
it
as Discourses sharpest
And
weapon.
think most readers will agree that those passages which sing, that
sound the war drums, that explode spontaneously,

powerful sections of the
essay.
But those readers who
are the
most
are expecting
a systematic critique replete with hypotheses, sufficient evidence, topic

sentences,
and
bound
bullet points, are
for disappointment.
sider Cesaire's third proposition regarding poetic
"Poetic knowledge
of his mobilized
Surrealism
like the
it
has
is
is
which man
that in
knowledge:
spatters the object
with
all
riches."
also
important to the formation o^ Discourse because,
movements that gave rise to Pan-Africanism and Negritude,
its
own independent
anticolonial roots.
am
not suggesting
that Cesaire's critique of colonialism necessarily derived

surrealists; rather, I
want
to suggest that the
the time)
and the
their position
surrealists
can be partly explained by
toward Empire.
surrealists
were
Up
pronouncements but displayed
and the extreme
left
until the
little
in 1925,
om
th e
att raction
at
affinities jn
mid- 1920s, the Euro-
largely cultural iconoclasts
But that would change
mutual
fr
many other black intellectuals
engendered between Cesaire (and
pean
Con-
who made
radical
interest in social revolution.
when
the Paris Surrealist
Group
of the French Communist Party were drawn
together by their support of Abd-el-Krim, leader of the Rif uprising

against French colonialism in
Morocco. They actively called for the
ROBIN
overthrow of French colonial
rule.
Letter" to Paul Claudel, writer
That same
D.G.
KELLEY
year, in
19
an "Open
and French ambassador
to Japan,
the Paris group announced: "We^rofoundjj^hope th
wars,ôlonial insurrections, will annihilate this Western civilization
whose vermin you defend even

Paris
group produced
its
in the Orient."
Seven years later, the
most militant statement on the
colonial
question to date. Titled "Murderous Humanitarianism" (1932) and

drafted mainly by
Rene Crevel and signed by Andre Breton, Paul
Eluard, Benjamin Peret, Yves Tanguy, and the Martinican surrealists
Pierre Yoyotte
attack
on
and J.M. Monnerot, the document
a relentless
colonialism, capitalism, the clergy, the black bourgeoisie,
and hypocritical
liberals.
They argue
which the modern West was

and genocide.
And
that the very
humanism upon
built also justified slavery, colonialism,
they called for action, noting, "we Surrealists
pronounced ourselves
its
is
in favor of changing the imperialist war, in
chronic and colonial form, into a
civil
war.
Thus we placed our
energies at the disposal of the revolution, of the proletariat

struggles,
and defined our
and
its
attitude towards the colonial problem,
and hence towards the color question."
While "Murderous Humanitarianism"

Cesaire's critique, he
proletariat, that
is
had less
than
certainly resonates with
faith in the proletariat
those
who
the European
signed this document. More-
over, as a product of the period following the
Second World War,
Discourse go es one step fiirther by drawing a direct link between the

logic of colonialism
and Ihe
rise
of fascism. Cesaire provocatively
points out_that Europeans tolerated "Nazism before
on them,
that they absolved
because, until then,
it
it,
shut their eyes to
had been applied only
it,
to
it
was inflkted
legitimized
re>
it,
non-European
peoples; that they have cultivated that Nazism, that they are responsible for
it,
and
that before engulfing the
whole
edifice
of Western,
20
Christian civilization in
trickles
from
its
every crack."
reddened waters,
So
it
oozes, seeps,
and
crime of fascism was the
the real
application to white people of colonial procedures "which until then
had been reserved
exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the 'coolies'
of India, and the 'niggers' of Africa."
36) Here
(p.
we must
Cesaire within a larger context of radical black intellectuals
come
to the
including W.E.B.
argues, a
Du Bois,
group of
radical black intellectuals,
C.L.R. James, George Padmore, and
Oliver Cox, understood fascism not as
some
aberration from the
an unexpected right-wing turn, but a
progress,
development of Western Civilization

a blood relative of slavery
not only in
who had
same conclusions before the publication of Discourse.
As Cedric Robinson
march of
situate
at the
Ralph Bunche, then a
economy but
racist ideologies that
dawn of modernity. As
early as 1936,
radical political science professor at
Howard
University, suggested that imperialisrn^gaye birth to fascism.
doctrine of Fascism," wrote Bunche, "with
exaggerated exaltation of the state and
new and
of race, has given a
as
and imperialism, global systems rooted
capitalist political
were already in place
logical
They viewed fascism
itself
its
its
"The
extreme jingoism,
its
comic-opera glorification
greater impetus to the policy of world
imperialism which had conquered and subjected to systematic and

ruthless exploitation virtually
jêarth."
"I
all
of the darker populations of the
Du Bois made some of the clearest statements to this effect:
knew that
Hitler
and Mussolini were fighting communism, and
\ using race prejudice to make some white people rich and all colored
I
people poor. But
it
was not
until later that
realized that the
colonialism of Great Britain and France had exactly the same object
and methods as the fascists and the Nazis were trying clearly to
Later, in
The World and Africa (1947), he
Nazi atrocity
writes:
concentration camps, wholesale
use."
"There was no
maiming and mur-

ROBIN
der, defilement
of
women
D.G.
21
KELLEY
or ghastly blasphemy of childhood
which Christian civilization or Europe had not long been practicing

against colored folk in
all
parts of the
world in the name of and for
the defense of a Superior Race born to rule the world."^^
The
very idea that there was a superior race lay at the heart of
and
the matter,
this
why
is
elements of Discourse also drew on
Negritude's impulse to recover the history of Africa's accomplish-
ments. Taking his cue from Leo Frobenius's injunction that^he

"idea of the barbaric
Negro
is
European invention,"^ Cesaire
out to prove that the colonial mission to

just a
smoke
a high level of sophistication
societies that
remake the modern world. Indeed,
and Asian
how we might
village
Discourse was not the
West
offer
and
live together
but
Kenneth Kaunda, and
establish socialism
on
the
life.
first
place Cesaire
made
the case for the
follov^ng the path of the civilized African. In his Intro-
duction to Victor Schoelcher's Esclavage
The men
might
at
romantic claims advanced by African
Senghor himself, that modern Africa can
barbaric
is
Cesaire's insistence that pre-colo-
nationalist leaders such as Julius Nyerere,
of pre-colonial
that
cultures "were not only ante-capitalist
also anti-capitalist," anticipated
basis
not only function
and complexity, but
he West valuable lessons about
nial African
"civilize" the primitive
screen. If anything, colonialism results in the massive
destruction of whole societies
sets
they took away
knew how to
erect cities, cultivate fields,
Their religion had
its
beauty, based
city.
he wrote:
build houses, govern empires,
mine for metals, weave cotton,
own
with the founder of the
et colonisation,
forge steel.
on mystical connections
Their customs were pleasing, built on
unity, kindness, respect for age.
22
No
coercion, only mutual assistance, the joy of living, a free accep-
tance of discipline.
Order
Earnestness
Reading
Poetry and Freedom.
this passage,
and the book
itself,
deeply affected one of
Cesaire's brightest students, nanied Frantz Fanon.
tion for
him
revela-
and "accounts of learned
to discover cities in Africa
blacks." "All of that,"
was a
It
he noted in BUck Skin, White Masks (1952),
"exhumed from the past, spread with its insides out, made it possible
for
me
to find a valid historical place.
The white man was wrong,
was not a primitive, not even a half-man,
in gold and silver

..-~-^~
had already been working
belonged to a race that
two thousand years
21
ago.
Neritude.Jturned out to be a miraculous

to overthrow the "barbaric Negro."
in Black
As Cedric Robinson points out
Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition^
was no easy
task, since the
invention of the Negro
sion the fabrication of whiteness

that
weapo n in the struggle
came with it
and by
this
exten-
and all the racial boundary policing
required "immense expenditures of psychic and
intellectual energies
of the West."
An entire generation of "enlight-
ened" European_schQlars worked hard to wipe out theûltural and

intellectual contributions
history, to
whiten the West in order to maintain the purity of the
"European"
of
of Egypt and Nubia from European
race.
They also
stripped
"civilization," using the printed
all
of Africa of any semblance
page to eradicate
and thus reduce a whole continent and
its
than beasts of burden or brutish heathens.
ttieir
progeny to
The
result
is
history
little
more
the fabrica-
tion of Europe as a discrete, racially pure entity, solely responsible

for modernity,
on
the other.
on
the one hand,
and the
fabrication of the
Negro
ROBIN
D.G.
23
KELLEY
Yet, despite Cesaire's construction of pre-colonial Africa as an)
aggregation of warm,
Unlike
communal societies, henever calls for a return, j ^^
his old friend
future-oriented
Senghor, Cesaire's concept of Negritude
and modern. His position
"For us the problem
cal:
is
It is
to revive.
is
unequivo-
not to make a Utopian and sterile attempt
to repeat the past, but to go beyond.
want
in Discourse
is
It is
not a dead society that we
We leave that to those who go in for exoticism ....
new society that we must create, with
slaves, a society rich
with
all
the productive
the help of our brother
power of modern
times,
warm with all the fraternity of olden days."

Then comes the shocking next line:
possible,
we can look
Cesaire had been a leader in the
Communist
"For some examples showing that

to the Soviet
this
is
Union."
By 1950, of course,
Party of Martinique for about five years.
On the Communist ticket,
he was elected mayor of Fort-de-France
as well as
Deputy
to the
French National Assembly. Now, given everything he has written

thus
far,
everything that he has lived,
Stalinism circa
a_great
950s
as
why would
he hold up
an exemplar of the new society? Why:wQuJd
poet and major voice of surrealism and Negritude suddenly
join the
Communist
Party? Actually, once
of the postwar world, his decision
is
we
consider the context
not shocking
at
First,
all.
remember that Communist parties worldwide, especially in Europe,

were
at their
height immediately after the war, and Joe Stalin spent
the war years as an ally of liberal democracy. Second, several leading
committed
to radical social change, particularly
writers
and
in the
Caribbean and Latin America, became Communists
artists
in-
cluding Cesaire's friends, Jacques Romain, Nicolas Guillen, and
Rene Depestre. Third,

volved in
politics,
Cesaire,
who was
discovered early
on
reluctant to
become
in-
that he could be effective.
24
Almost as soon as he was elected, Cesaire set out to change the status
of Martinique, Guadeloupe, Guiana, and Reunion from colonies
French Republic. Departmentaliza-
to "departments" within the

tion,
he
insisted,
would put
on an equal footing with
these areas
departments in metropolitan France. Cesaire's eloquent and passionate arguments led to a law in
zation.
However,
the republic
his
1946
resulting in departmentali-
dream that assimilation of the old colonies into
would guarantee equal
dream. In the end, French
rights
officials
greater numbers, often displacing
turned out to be a pipe
were sent to the colonies in
some of the
local black Martini-
can bureaucrats. By the time he drafted the popularly

edition o^ Discourse in 1955, he
known
had become an outspoken
third
critic
of
departmentalization.
Thus, given Cesaire's role
as
Communist
leader,
we should not
be surprised by Discourses nod to the Soviet Union, or even the final

closing lines of the text, in
as
our
savior.
What
is
which he names proletarian revolution
jarring,
however,
is
statements are in relation to the rest of the

that
Europe
is
a dying civilization,
how
text.
incongruous these
After demonstrating
one on the verge of self-destruc-
don^(in which the chickens of colonial violence and tyranny have
come home to
roost while the white
working class looks on
in silent
complicity), he proposes proletarian revolution as the final solution!

Yet, throughout the book,
is
he anticipates Fanon, implying that there
nothing worth saving in Europe, that the European working
class
has too often joined forces with the European bourgeoisie in their
support of racism, imperialism, and colonialism, and that the

uprisings of the colonized might point the way forward. Ultimately,
Discourse
is
surrealism
a challenge to, or revision of, Marxism;
it
draws on
and the anti-rationalist ideas of Cesaire's early poetry and
explorations in Negritude.
It is fairly
unmaterialist in the way it cries
ROBIN
out for
new
D.G.
25
KELLEY
emerge out of the study of what
spiritual values to
colonialism sought to destroy.

Cesaire's position vis-a-vis
than one year
Marxism becomes even
October 1956, Cesaire pens
famous
his
Secretary General of the French

resignation
from the
letter to
Communist
party. Besides
its
Maurice Thorez,
Party, tendering his
stinging rebuke of Stalinism,
the heart of the letter dealt with the colonial question

Party's policies
clearer less
of Discourse appeared. In
after the third edition
not
just the
toward the colonies but the colonial relationship
between the metropolitan and the Martinican Communist
Arguing that people of color need
Parties.
to exercise self-determination,
warned
against treating the "colonial question ...
part of
some more important
he
as a subsidiary
global matter." Racism, in other
words, cannot be subordinate to the
class struggle.
His
letter is
an
even bolder, more direct assertion of third world unity than Discourse.
Although he
alliances,
still
identifies as a
Marxist and
he cautions that there "are no
following the
by divine
open
to
right." If
Communist Party "pillages our most vivifying friend-
ships, breaks the
bond
severs the tie that
has served us
allies
is still
ill
that
makes us
weds us
to other
Africa's child, then
all chill
abstractions."
Cesaire's investment in a third-world revolt
society certainly anticipates Fanon.
Europe and the old humanism and
communism
More
important,
paving the way for a
HeTiad
its
say
islands,
brotherhood for what
in having us trade a living
seems to be the coldest of
West Indian
practically given
new
up on
claims of universality, opting
instead to re-define the "universal" in a
way
that did not privilege
Europe. Cesaire explains, "I'm not going to confine myself to some
narrow particularism. But
don't intend either to
disembodied universalism
It is
a universal rich with
all
become
lost in a
have a different idea of a universal.
that
is
particular, rich
with
all
the
26
deepening of each
particulars there are, the
tence of them
What
letter
all."
more
Cesaire articulates in Discourse, and
to Thorez,
distills
was what Negritude was

racial essentialism.
explicitly in his
the spirit that swept through African
intellectual circles in the age
of
particular, the coexis-
all
of decolonization. This pervasive spirit
about then;
Critic,
was never a simple matter
it
and filmmaker Maathia
scholar,
Diajvara beautifully captures the atmosphere of the era and, implicitly,
what
these radical critiques of the colonial order, such as
Discourse on Colonialism,
meant to
new generation: "The idea that
Negritude was bigger even than Africa, that

international
moment which held
we were
part of an
the promise of universal emanci-
pation, that our destiny coincided with the universal freedom of
workers and colonized people worldwide
and more important
all this
gave us a bigger
identity than the ones previously available to
us through kinship, ethnicity, and race ....
The
awareness of our
new historical mission freed us from what we regarded in those days

of our fathers and their religious entrap-
as the archaic identities
ments;
it
freed us
of French
from race and banished our
identity.
To
fear
of the whiteness
be labeled the saviors of humanity,
when
only recently we had been colonized and despised by the world, gave
us a feeling of righteousness,
racialism of all origins,
and
In light of recent events
which bred contempt
for capitalism,
tribalism."
genocide
in East Africa, the collapse
of democracy throughout the continent, the isolation of Cuba, the
overthrow of progressive movements throughout the so-called third
world
some might
passed, that Cesaire
argue that the
and
moment of truth
Fanon's predictions proved
has already
false.
We're
facing an era where fools are calling for a renewal of colonialism,
where descriptions of violence and
instability
draw on the very
ROBIN
colonial language of "barbarism"
But
critiques in these pages.
while colonialism in
its
and "backwardness"
this
is all
that Cesaire
a mystification; the fact
Many of the
problems of democracy are
products of the old colonial state whose primary difference

presence of black faces.
the class
It
has to do with the
Fanon warned
us
French
Stalinists
officers, the
whose sympathy
new jack U.S.
for the
the
is
of a new ruling
rise
about^who
mimicking the colonial masters, whether they

British or
is,
formal sense might have been dismanded,
the colonial state has not.
class
27
D.G. KELLEY
are content with
are the old-school
corporate rulers, or the
"backward" countries often mir-
rored the very colonial discourse Cesaire exposes.
As the
true radicals of postcolonial theory will
hardly in a "postcolonial"
moment. The
have been removed, but the

established
political,
by colonial domination
tions. Discourse
is
less
economy than with
colonial domination required a

in
which everything
that
is
are
remain with some
still
specifics
The
of
altera-
political
lesson here
is
advanced, good, and civilized
European terms. Discourse
move forward
as rapidly as possible,
that
and yet
calls
is
defined
on the world
calls for
to
the overthrow
ideology of progress, one built on violence,
destruction, genocide.
Both Fanon and Cesaire warn the colored
world not to follow Europe's
footsteps,
and not
to
go back to the
new direction altogether. What we've

however (and here I must include Cesaire's own
ancient way, but to carve out a
been witnessing,
beloved Martinique, where he
still
holds forth as mayor of Fort-de-
France) hardly reflects the imagination and vision captured in these

brief pages.
whole way of thinking, a discourse
in
class's
we
economic, and cultural links
thinking.
and measured
of a master
you,
apparatus might
official
concerned with the
way of
tell
The same old political parties,
the same armies, the same
methods of labor exploitation, the same education, the same
tactics
28
of incarceration,
exiling, snuffing
out
dare to imagine a radically different
and
artists
intellectuals
who
way of living, who dare to invent
the marvelous before our very eyos.
In the end. Discourse was never intended to be a roadjnapjor a

blueprint for revolution.
It is
poetry and therefore rev olt.
of insurrection, drawn from Cesaire's
own
I t is
an act
miraculous weapons,
molded and shaped by his work with Tropiques and
its
challenge to
the Vichy regime; by his imbibing of European culture and his sense
of alienation from both France and his native land.
blow to the master

comrade.
It is
who
revolutionary
graffiti
with deadly accuracy, clearing the
it is
field so that
history with what's left standing. Discourse

a dead
a rising, a
painted in bold strokes across
the great texts of Western Civilization;
ment about
It is
appears as owner and ruler, teacher and
order. If anything,
it is
is
hand grenade
tossed
we might write a new

hardly a dead docu-
a call for us to
plumb
the
depths of the imagination for a different way forward. Just as Cesaire
drew on Lautreamont's Chants de Maldoror

nibalistic nature
Discourse offers
to illuminate the can-
of capitalism and the power of poetic knowledge.
new
insights into the consequences
of colonialism
and a model for dreaming a way out of our postcolonial predicament.

/while we still need to overthrow all vestiges of the old colonial order,
^destroying the old
is
just half the battle.
Aime
Cesaire
Translated by Joan
Pinkham
by Aime Cesaire
A civilization
creates
is
that proves incapable of solvin g the problems
a decadent civilization.
civilization that chooses
problems
is
toxlose
its
eyes to
its
most
crucial
a stricken civilizati on.
A civilization that uses its principles fo r trickery and deceit

dying
civilization.
The
fact
civilization
rule, is
it
is
that the so-called
as
it
European
civilization
is
"Western"
has been shaped by two centuries of bourgeois
incapable of solving the two major problems to which
existence has given
rise:
colonial problem; that
its
the probl em of the proletariat andjthe
Europe is unable to justify itself either before
the bar of "reason" or before the bar of "conscience"; and that,

increasingly,
it
odious because
takes refuge in a hypocrisy

it is less
and
which
less likely to deceive.
31
is all
the
more
32
Europe
is
indefensible.
Apparently that
is
what the American
whispering
strategists are
to each other.
That
in itself is not serious.
What
is
serious
is
that
"Euro pe"
is
morally, spirit ually i ndefen-
sible,
And
today the indictment
is
brought against
European masses alone, but on a world

millions of men
âs
it
n ot by the
by tens and tens of
scale,
who, from the depths of slavery,
set themselYesjj.p
judges.
The
colonialists
may
kill
in Indochina, torture in Madagascar,
imprison in Black Africa, crack

forth the colonized
They know that
know
their
down
in the
West
Indies.
Hence-
that they have an advantage over them.
temporary "masters" are
lying.
Therefore that their masters are weak.
And
since
have been asked to speak about colonization and
civilization, let us
go straight to the principal
lie
that
is
the source
of all the others.

Colonization and civilization?
In dealing with this subject, the
in
good
faith
of a
commonest curse is to be the dupe
collective hypocrisy that cleverly misrepresents
problems, the better to legitimize the hateful solutions provided

for them.
In other words, the essential thing here

clearly-that js, dangerously
first
and
to
question: what, fu ndamentally,
is
to see clearly, to think
answe r
is
clearlyjhe
nnQnt
colonizationP^To agree on
what it is not: neither evangelization, nor a philantKropic enterprise,

nor a desire to push back the frontiers of ignorance,
disease,
and
tyranny, nor a project undertaken for the greater glory of God, nor
an attempt to extend the
rule
of law.
To admit
once and for
all,
33
AIMfiCfiSAIRE
without flinching
consequences, that the decisive actors here
at the
are the adventurer
and the
pirate, the wholesale grocer
and the ship
owner, the gold digger and the merchant, appetite and
and
force,
behind them, the baleful projected shadow of a form of civilization

which,
at a certain
point in
its
internal reasons, to extend to a
history, finds itself obliged, for
world
scale the
competition of
its
antagonistic economies.
Pursuing my analysis,
find that hypocrisy
neither Cortez discovering Mexico
is
of recent date; that
from the top of the great teocalli,
nor Pizzaro before Cuzco (much less Marco Polo before Cambuluc),
claims that he
is
the harbinger of a superior order; that they kill; that
they plunder; that they have helmets, lances, cupidities; that the
slavering apologists
is
came
later; that
Christian pedantry, which laid
Christianity - civilization,
the chief culprit in this
down
paga nism - savagery, from which
not but ensue abominable colonialist and
domain
the dishonest equations

there could
consequences, whose
racist
victims were to be the Indians, the Yellow peoples, and the Negroes.
That being
settled,
admit that
it
is
good thing
to place
an
different civilizations in contact with each other; that
it
excellent thing to blend different worlds; that whatever
its
own
withdraws into
itself
particular genius
may
be, a civilization that
atrophies; that for civilizations, exchange
is
is
oxygen; that the great
good fortune of Europe is to have been a crossroads, and that because

it^was the locus of
meeting place of
all
all
ideas, the receptacle of
sentiments,
it
all
philosophies, the
was the best center
for the
redistribution of energy.
But then
ask the following question: has colonization really
placed civilizations in
establishing contact,
I
answer
no.
contact?'
was
it
Or,
the best?
if
you
prefer, ofall
tHFways of
^l
.^^/)
34
And
say that between colonization
infinite distance; that
and
civilization there
is
an
out of all the colonial expeditions that have
been undertaken, out of
all
the colonial statutes that have been
drawn up, out of all the memorandajhathavebeen dispatched by

all
the ministries, there could not
come
a single
human value.
First
we must
how
study
colonizer, to brutalize
Kim
colonization works to decivilize the
in the true sense of the
him, to awaken him to buried
word, to degrade
instincts, to covetousness, violence,
rê hatred, and moral relativism; and we must show that each time
a head
is
cut off or an eye put out in
Vietnam and
accept the
fact,
each time a
accept the
fact,
each time a Madagascan
they accept the
little girl is
fact, civilization
in France they
raped and in France they

is
tortured and in France
acquires another dead weight, a
universal regression takes place, a gangrene sets in, a center of
end of all
infection begins to spread;
andjhat
at the
that have been violated,
these
that have been propagated,
all
lies
these punitive expeditions that have been tolerated,
oners
who
who
have been tied up and "interrogated,"
have been tortured,
been encouraged,
all
at the
end of all the
all
racial
these treaties
all
all
these pris-
these patriots
pride that has
the boastfulness that has been displayed, a
35
36
poison has been

:f^;>
distilled into the veins
of Europe and, slowly but
surely, the continent proceeds tow2ird savagery.
And
then one fine day the bourgeoisie
awakened by a
is
terrific
boomerang effect: the gestapos are busy, the prisons fill up, the torturers
standing around the racks invent, refine, discuss.
People are surprised, they become indignant. They

strange!
But never mind
it's
Nazism,
will pass!"
it
say:
And
"How
they wait,
and they hope; and they hide the truth from themselves,
that
it is
barbarism, the supreme barbarism, the crowning barbarism that

,
sums up
all
the daily barbarisms; that
before they were

tolerated that
absolved
it
it,
its
victims, they
Nazism before
shut their eyes to
had been applied only
to
it
it,
were
was
Nazism
it is
accomplices; that they
its
inflicted
legitimized
it,
on them,
that they
because, until then,
non-European peoples; that they have
cultivated that Nazism, that they are responsible for

1
but that
yes,
it,
and that
before engulfing the whole edifice of Western, Christian civilization

in
its
reddened waters,
Yes,
it
it
oozes, seeps,
and
from every crack.
trickles
would be worthwhile to study clinically, in detail,
the steps
taken by Hitler and Hitlerism and to reveal to the very distinguished, very humanistic, very Christian bourgeois of the twentieth
century that without his being aware of
it,
him, that Hitler inhabits him, that Hitler

rails
he
against him, he
is
it is
the white
is
his
demon, that
is
not the crime in
not the humiliation of man as such,
itself,
it is
man, the humiliation of the white man,
he applied to Europe
if
he
being inconsistent and that, at bottom, what
cannot forgive Hitler for
man,
he has a Hitler inside
colonialist procedures
the crime against
the crime against
andme tact that
which
until then
had
been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the "coolies" of

India,
and the "niggers" of Africa.
AIMECESAIRE
And
that
the great thing
is
that for too long
it
of those rights has
been
hold against pseudo-humanism:
has diminished the rights of man, that
and biased and,
plete
narrow and
ând
all
still is
fact
t hat
scale
and
at its present stage,
capitalist society,
concept
racist.
B gcausejie
he makesjtôssiblejojecthings on a large
its
fragmentary, incom-
things considered, sordidly
have talked a good deal about Hitler.
37
des erves
it:
to grasp the
incapable of
is
men,
just as
it
incapable of establishing a system of individual
ethics.
Whether one
establishing a concept of the rights of all
likes
it
or not, at the end of the blind alley that
is
Europe,
Europe of Adenauer, Schuman, Bidault, and a few

Hitler.
there
At the end of capitalism, which

Hitler.
is
ments:
this
mean
being
is
so,
others, there
eager to outlive
cannot help thinking of one of

equality but to domination
agricultural laborers, or industrial workers. It
eliminating the inequalities
amongmen
The country
rings clear, haughty,
is
and
brutal,
not a question of
speaking?
let
am ashamed
and plants us squarely
us
That the passage
is
come down
to say
his
it:
it
is
name
a step.
Renan
taken from a book entitled
intellectuelle et morale, that it
was written
which France had represented
as a
us a great deal about bourgeois morals.
is
an
La Reforme
in France just after a
war of right
in
the Western
is
against might,
"^
of
but of widêningthem and
humanist, the "idealist" philosopher. That

accident.
is
serfs,
into a law."
the middle of howling savagery. But
Wh o
day,
its
his state-
of a foreign race must become once again a country of
That
is
Hitler.
"Weas pire not to
making them
the
At the end of formal humanism and philosophic
renunciation, there
And
is
has proved
war
tells
38
The
regeneration of the inferior or degenerate races by the
superior races
With
us, the
heavy hand
tool.
is
part of the providential order of things for humanity.
common man
is
is
nearly always a declasse nobleman, his
better suited to handling the
Rather than work, he chooses to
first estate.
Regere imperio populos, that
sword than the menial
fight, that
all-consuming activity onto countries which,
who
pean society into a ver sacrum, a horde
like those
Lombards, or the Normans, and every
man will
a race of workers, the
this
China, are crying
like
aloud for foreign conquest. Turn the adventurers
Nature has made
he returns to his
is,
our vocation. Pour forth
is
disturb Euro-
of the Franks, the
be in his right
Chinese
race,
who
role.
have
wonderful manual dexterity and almost no sense of honor; govern
them with
justice, levying
from them,
in return for the blessing

race,
and
the Negro; treat
him
such a government, an ample allowance for the conquering

they will be
satisfied; a race
of tillers of the
with kindness and humanity, and
all
will
soil,
be
of
as
it
should; a race of
masters and soldiers, the European race. Reduce this noble race to
working
in the ergastulum like
In Europe, every rebel
made
calling, a creature
setting a task that

soldier.
But the
is,
is
Negroes and Chinese, and they
more or
less,
a soldier
for the heroic
life,
who
before
whom
contrary to his race, a poor worker, too
life at
which our workers
rebel
is
Hitler? Rosenberg?
But
winded
M.
let
us
made for, and all will he
are
good
least.
Let
well.
No, Renan.
come down one
politician.
you
would make a Chinese
or a fellah happy, as they are not military creatures in the

each one do what he
rebel.
has missed his
step further.
And
it is
Who protests? No one, so far as I
the long-
know, when
Albert Sarraut, the former governor-general of Indochina,
holding forth to the students

that
it
would be
enterprises in the
at the
Ecole Coloniale, teaches them
puerile to object to the
name of "an
European colonial
alleged right to possess the land

39
AIMfiCfiSAIRE
one occupies, and some
which would
sort of right to
remain in
leave unutilized resources to
lie
fierce isolation,
forever idle in the
hands of incompetents."
And who
roused to indignation
is
assures us that if the goods of this

indefinitely, as they
a certain Rev. Barde
world "remained divided up
would be without
God
answer neither the purposes of
human
when
colonization, they
nor the
just
would
demands of the
MuUer,
"Hu-
declares:
manity must not, cannot allow the incompetence, negligence, and

of the uncivilized peoples to leave
wealth which
serve the
God has confided to
idle indefinitely the
them, charging them to make
it
good of all."
No one.
I
mean not one
established writer, not
preacher, not one crusader for the right
"defender of the
And yet,
considered
human
one academic, not one
and
for religion,
not one
person."
through the mouths of the Sarrauts and the Bardes, the
MuUers and
the Renans, through the
and
consider
it
mouths of
all
those
who
lawful to apply to non-European
peoples "a kind of expropriation for public purposes" for the benefit
of nations that were stronger and better equipped,

Hitler speaking
What am
innocently, that
which
and
is
driving at?
At
this idea:
colonizes, that a civilization
therefore force
is
was already
no one colonizes
which
justifies
that a nation
colonization
already a sick civilization, a civilization which

irresistibly,
quence to another, one denial

punishment.
that
no one colonizes with impunity either;
morally diseased, which
its
it
^v>
collectivity"?
Since, as his fellow Christian, the Rev.
laziness
progressing from one conse-
to another, calls for
its
Hitler,
mean
(^
Colonization: bridgehead in a campaign to civilize barbarism,
from which there may emerge
at
any moment the ne^tiQiLja
pure and simple.
civilization,
Elsewhere
have cited
at length a
few incidents culled from the
history of colonial expeditions.
Unfortunately, this did not find favor with everyone.
^3
y d
.
40
"u
that
was pulling old skeletons out of the
Was
there
no point
in
It
seems
closet. Indeed!
quoting Colonel de Montagnac, one of
^ 3^j/the conquerors of Algeria: "In order to banish the thoughts that

^ 3^ sometimes besiege me, have some heads cut off, not the heads of
> i
\ artichokes but the heads of men."
Would
it
have been more advisable to refuse the floor to Count
d'Herisson: "It
is
true that
of ears collected, pair by
Should
barbarous
we
pair,
are bringing
from
back a whole
prisoners, friendly or
barrelful
enemy."
have denied Saint-Arnaud the right to profess his
"We
faith:
lay waste,
we
burn,
we
plunder,
we
destroy
the houses and the trees."
Should
all
have prevented Marshal Bugeaud from systematizing
that in a daring theory
ancestors:
"We must
invasions of the Franks
Lasdy, should
memorable
feat
and invoking the precedent of famous
have a great invasion of Africa,
and the Goths."
have cast back into the shadows of oblivion the
of arms of General Gerard and kept
capture of Ambike, a city which, to
of defending
itself:
men, but no one
like the
"The
tell
the truth,
native riflemen
had orders
restrained them; intoxicated
they spared not one
woman, not one
child.
afternoon, the heat caused a light mist to
silent
about the
had never dreamed

to
kill
only the
by the smell of blood,

... At the end of the
arise: it
was the blood of
the five thousand victims, the ghost of the city, evaporating in the
setting sun."
"^
AIMfiCESAIRE
Ye s
or no, arc these things true?
And
41
the sadistic pleasures, the
nameless delights that send voluptuous shivers and quivers through

Loti's carcass
when he
focuses his field glasses
on
good massacre
of the Annamese? True or not true?
And if these
no one can deny,
order to minimize them, that
will
it
be
said, in
things are true, as
these corpses don't prove anything?
For
my
butcheries,
part, if
it is
but because
these
have recalled a few
details
of these hideous
by no means because I take a morbid delight in them,
think that these heads of men, these collections of ears,
burned houses, these Gothic invasions,
this
steaming blood,
these cities that evaporate at the edge of the sword, are not to be so
easily
izes
disposed of.
They prove that colonization, I repeat, dehuman-
even the most civijized manj that colonial
enterpr ise, colonial conquest, which

native a nd justified
him who undertakes
is
activity, colonial
based on contempt for the
by that contempt, inevitably tends

it;
that the colonizer,
who
to
change
in order to ease his
c onscien ce gets into the habit of seeing the other
man as an animal,
accustoms himself to treating him like an animal, and tends objectively

to transform himselfmto an animal. Itjs^this result, this
e ffect of colonization that
wan ted
Unfair? No. There was a time
boomerang
to point out.
when
these
same
facts
were a
source of pride, and when, sure of the morrow, people did not mince
words.
One last quotation;
an Essai sur
from a
la colonisation (Paris,
The new countries

ties
it is
certain Carl Siger, author of
1907):
offer a vast field for individual, violent activi-
which, in the metropolitan countries, would run up against
certain prejudices, against a sober
and orderly conception of life, and
which, in the colonies, have greater freedom to develop and, consequently, to affirm their worth.
Thus
to a certain extent the colonies
42
can serve
as a safety valve for
only value,
it
modern
society.
Even
if this
were
their
would be immense.
make
Truly, there are sins for which no one has the power to
amends and which can never be

But
I
^'
let
us speak about the colonized.
see clearly
what colonization has destroyed: the wonderful
Indian civilizations
and
neither Deterding nor Royal
Standard Oil will ever console

jsee clearly the
into
fully expiated.
civilizations,
me for the Aztecs and
Dutch nor
the Incas.
condemned to perish at a future date,
which it has introduced a principle of ruin: the South Sea Islands,
Nigeria, Nyasaland.
Security? Culture?
see less clearly the contributions
The
rule
it
has made.
of law? In the meantime,
look
around and wherever there are colonizers and colonized face to

I
see force, brutality, cruelty, sadism, conflict, and, in a
education
the hasty manufacture of a few thousand subordinate
functionaries, "boys,'âHisaH~s7officFcIerEs,
sary for the

I
face,
parody of
and
interpreters neces-
smooth operation of businessr^^
spoke of contact.
Between colo nizer and colonized there
is
ro
om
only for forced
labor, intimidation, pressure, the police, taxation, theft, rape,
com-
pulsory crops, contempt, mistrust, arrogance, self-complacency,

swinishness, brainless
elites,
degraded masses.
"
No human contact, but relations of domination and submission

which turn the colonizing man into a classroom monitor, an army
sergeant, a prison guard, a slave driver,
and the indigenous man into
an instrument of production.
My turn to state an equation: colonization =

I
hear the storm.
"thingification."
They talk to me about progress, abouP'achieve-
ments," diseases cured, improved standards of living.
VS-
am
43
^P^^s
ecor>c>w>'"_/
AIMECESAIRE
Ô^*^^
'
\C. _CJ'V>^
talking about societies drained of their essence, cultures
trampled underfoot, institutions undermined, lands confiscated,

religions
smashed, magnificent
artistic creations
destroyed, extraor-
dinary possibilities wiped out.
They throw facts at my head, statistics,

and
(l>v^>
railroad tracks.
/a
\>%o>^vOv^
mileages of roads, canals,

t>A
=ro|
|^ a.Aâ-^^
m talkin g about thousands of men sacrificed to the Congo-
Ocean.
am
talking about those
the harbor of Abidjan by hand.
who,
as
write
this, are
digging
am talking about millions of men
from
torn from their gods, their land, their habits, their
life
life,
from the dance, from wisdom.
am
talking about millions of
cunningly
instilled,
who
men
in
whom
have been taught to have an inferiority
complex, to tremble, kneel, despair, and behave
They dazzle me with
been
fear has
like flunkeys.
the tonnage of cotton or cocoa that has been
exported, the acreage that has been planted with olive trees or grapevines.
/am talking about natural economies that have been disrupted

harmonious and viable economies adapted
lation
about
to the indigenous
popu-
food crops destroyed, malnutrition permanently
introduced, agricultural development oriented solely toward the

benefit of the metropolitan countries; about the looting of products,
the looting of raw materials.
They pride
I
ones
They
themselves on abuses eliminated.
too talk about abuses, but what

^very real
talk to
me
say
is
they have superimposed others
about
local tyrants
that in general the old tyrants get
that
on
the old
very detestable.
brought to reason; but
on very
well with the
new
note
ones,
and that there has been established between them, to the detriment
of the people, a
circuit
of mutual services and complicity.
44
They talk to me about civilization, I talk about proletarianization

and
mystification.
For
my part, I make a systematic defense of the non-European
civilizations.
Every day that passes, every denial of justice, every beating by

the police, every
demand of the workers
every scandal that

police van, every
is
that
is
drowned
in blood,
hushed up, every punitive expedition, every
gendarme and every militiaman, brings home
to
us the value of our old societies.
They were communal
societies,
never societies of the
many
for the few.
They were societies that were not only ante-capitalist, as has been
said,
but also
anti-capitalist.
They were democratic

They were
I
make
societies, always.
cooperative societies, fraternal societies.
a systematic defense of the societies destroyed
by
imperialism.
They were
the
their faults, they
were content to
fact,
they did not pretend to be the idea; despite
were neither to be hated nor condemned. They
be. In
them, neither the "wovA failure nor the word
avatar had any meaning.
Whereas those
They kept hope
are the only
intact.
words that can,
in
all
honesty, be
applied to the European enterprises outside Europe.
consolation
is
My
only
that periods of colonization pass, that nations sleep
only for a time, and that peoples remain.
This being
said,
have discovered in
it
seems that in certain
circles
they pretend to
me an "enemy of Europe" and a prophet of the
return to the pre-European past.
For
my
part,
search in vain for the place where
expressed such views; where
could have
ever underestimated the importance
AIMECESAIRE
of Eu rope in the history of human thought; where

a return of any ki nd; where
ever preached
ever claimed that there could be a return.
The truth is that I have said something very different:

the great historical tragedy of Africa has been not so
was too
late in
45
making contact with the
rest
to wit, that
much
of the world,
that
it
as the
manner in which that contact was brought about; that Europe began
to "propagate" at a time
most unscrupulous
when
financiers
it
had
fallen into the
hands of the
and captains of industry;
that
was
it
our misfortune to encounter that particular Europe on our path,
and
that
Europe
is
responsible before the
human community
for
the^highest heap of corpses in history.
In another connection, in judging colonization,

that
Europe has gotten on very well indeed with
lords
the local feudal
who agreed to serve, woven a villainous complicity with them,
rendered their tyranny more effective and more

it
all
have added
efficient,
and
that
has actually tended to prolong artificially the survival of local pasts
in their
I
alist
most pernicious
have said
and
aspects.
this
is
something very different
that coloni-
Europe has grafted modern abuse onto ancient injustice, hateful
racism onto old inequality.
That
if
colonialist
activity
am attacked on
Europe
is
dishonest in trying to justify
fields
change is always possible,
what
maintain that
colonizing
^^^
its
a posteriori by the obvious material progress that has been ^^^^^y.
achieved in certain
at
the grounds of intent,
stage of material
have been
if
under the colonial regime
since sudden
in history as elsewhere; since no one knows
development these same countries would
Europe had not intervened;
since the introduction
of
technology into Africa and Asia, their administrative reorganization,

in a word, their "Europeanization,"
was
(as is
proved by the example
of Japan) in no way tied to the European occupationi3\nce.
t)[it
q^'^~
^^^ JV
46
Europeanization of the non-European continents could have been
accomplished otherwise than under the heel of Europe; since
movement of Europeanization was

slowed down; since in any case
it
in progress; since
it
this
was even
was distorted by the European
takeover.
The proof is that at present it is the indigenous peoples of Africa

and Asia who
refuses
and
are
demanding schools, and colonialist Europe which
them; that
colonialist
colonized
it is
the African
Europe which
man who wants
holds things back.
to
is
who is asking for ports and roads,
niggardly
move
on
this score; that
it is
forward, and the colonizer
the
who
To go further, I make no secret of my opinion that at the present

time theârbarisrn^f Western Euro pe has reached an incredi bly
high
level,
being only surpassed
b arbar ism of the United
And I am
far surpassed,
it is
true
by
the
States.
not talking about Hitler, or the prison guard, or the
adventurer, but about the "decent fellow" across the way; not about
the
member of the
SS, or the gangster, but about the respectable
bourgeois. In a time gone by,
nant over the
Leon Bloy innocently became
indig-
fact that swindlers, perjurers, forgers, thieves,
and
procurers were given the responsibility of "bringing to the Indies

the example of Christian virtues."
We've made
virtues"
who
progress: today
intrigues
^with
it is
the possessor of the "Christian
no small
success
for the
honor of
administering overseas territories according to the methods of

forgers
and
torturers.
47
48
A sign
and corruption have
that cruelty, mendacity, baseness,
sunk deep into the soul of the European bourgeoisie.
^
or
repeat that
summary
am not talking about Hitler, or the SS, or pogroms,
executions.
But about a reaction caught unawares, a
reflex permitted, a piece
wanted,
of cynicism tolerated.
And
if
evidence
could mention a scene of cannibalistic hysteria that
is
have
been privileged to witness in the French National Assembly.
By Jove, my
you
dear colleagues
(a cannibal's hat,
Think of
it!
(as
they say),
take off
my hat
to
of course)
Ninety thousand dead
trampled underfoot, crushed to
in Madagascar!
Indochina
bits, assassinated, jtqrtures
brought
back from the depths of the Middle Ages! And what a spectacle! The
delicious shudder that roused the dozing deputies.
Bidault, looking like a
unctuous
cannibalism ofshady
cannibalism of an
communion wafer dipped in shit
and sanctimonious cannibalism; Moutet

deals
The wild uproar!
and sonorous nonsense; Coste-Floret
the
the
unlicked bear cub, a blundering fool.

Unforgettable, gentlemen!
as a
mummy's wrappings
With fine phrases as cold and solemn
they
conventional words they stab
tie
him
up the Madagascan. With

for you.
The time
it
a few
takes to
wet
your whistle, they disembowel him for you. Fine work! Not a drop
of blood
will
be wasted.
The ones who drink
it straight, to the last drop. The ones like

who smear their faces with it in the manner of Silenus;
Fontlup-Esperaber, who starches his mustache with it, the walrus
Ramadier,
mustache of an ancient Gaul; old Desjardins bending over the

emanations from the vat and intoxicating himself with them as with
new wine.
it is
Violence!
The violence of the weak.
A significant thing:
not the head of a civilization that begins to rot
first. It is
the heart.
AIMECESAIRE
admit that
of Europe and
as far as the health
concerned, these
cries
of
and
"Kill! kill!"
"Let's see
49
civilization
is
some blood,"
men and virtuous young men

make a much more disagreeable
belched forth by trembling old
educated by the Jesuit Fathers,

impression on
occur in
And
me
than the most sensational bank holdups that
Paris.
that,
mind you,
On the contrary,
on
sniff
it
day
it
we
out,
is
by no means an exception.
bourgeois swinishness
for a century.
its trail
is
follow
We listen for
it,
lose
it,
jn erely examine
it
it
we
the rule.
take
again,
it. I
note
it,
for expressing itself openly
it
by
shadow
more nauseatingly exposed. Oh!
gentlemen does not bother me.

I
fmd
it,
is
We've been
we
surprise,
it,
and every
the racism of these
do not be come indignant over
and that is
all. I
and appearing
it.
am almost grateful to
in
broad daylight,
as a
is
A sign that the intrepid class which once stormed the Bastilles
now hamstrung. A sign that feels itself to be mortal. A sign that
it
feels itself to
sign.
it
you
be a corpse.
And when
the corpse starts to babble,
get this sort of thing:
There was only too much truth

Europeans who,
fellow
gaze
men
upon
written,
in the century
in this first impulse of the
ofColumbus, refused to recognize as their
the degraded inhabitants
ofthe new world.
One
cannot
the savage for an instant without reading the anathema
do not say upon
his soul alone,
but even on the externalform
ofhis body.
And
(That's
And
signed Joseph de Maistre.
it's
what
is
ground out by the mystical
then you get
From
this:
the selectionist point of view,
unfortunate
if
mill.)
would look upon
it
as
there should be a very great numerical expansion of
50
the yellow and black elements, which
However,
if the society
with a ruling
class
of the future
and
yellow
is
eliminate.
organized on a dualistic basis,
of dolichocephalic blonds
confined to the roughest labor,

to the
would be difficult to
it is possible
and a
class
of inferior race
wouldfall
that this latter role
black elements. In this case, moreover, they
would
not be an inconvenience for the dolichocephalic blonds but an

It must not beforgotten that [slavery]
advantage
than the domestication ofthe horse or the ox.

it
may
by
is
no more abnormal
therefore possible that
reappear in the future in one form or another.
even inevitable that
not
It is
come about
this will
instead
happen
It is
probably
the simplistic solution does
if
that of a single superior race, leveled out
selection.
That's what
is
ground out by the
scientific mill,
and
it's
signed
Lapouge.
And you
I
the
know
that
must
literary mill this time):
believe myself superior to the
Mambere. I know that I must take pride in my blood.
man
When a superior
actually ceases to be
And
it's
The
it
race ceases to believe itselfa chosen race,

race.^
into newspaper jargon
barbarian
He
cousin at
is
all.
is
of the same
a cousin.
Here there
and you
race, after
The yellow man,

is
made
is,
another Middle Ages.
as the
the black
all,
except by whites. ... If Europe
certainly be a regression, a
all,
get Faguet:
Roman and the

man,
a real difference, a real distance,
great one: an ethnological distance. After
been
When a superior
signed Psichari-soldier-of-Africa.
Translate
Greek,
a chosen
poor Bayas of
he actually ceases to be
ceases to believe himself superior,
superior.
it
(from the
also get this
is
not our
and
a very
civilization has never yet
becomes yellow,
there~will
new period of darkness and confusion,
that

AIMECESAIRE
And
then lower, always lower, to the bottom of the
than the shovel can go,
and the Revue
M.
des
Romains goes
am willing to
(It
doesn't matter, of course, that
name once
Farigoule changes his
Jules
again and here
of convenience.)^ The
on
carry
a discussion only with people
Would o ur valian t
apprehension
if the
row of some twenty pure
Negroes and Negresses
movement
associations
who
agree
M.
for
had on
its
metropoli-
of them in the vaUgYLof
Would there not have been
the
question had arisen of turning all powers
over to these Negroes, the sons of slaves? ...
this
that
populations.of.the Southwest never
have been touched by r ace prejudice ?
is
so far as to write this:
tan_soil ten million Blacks, five or six million
slightest
himself
calls
essential thing
to pose the following hypothesis: a France that
the Garonne.
lower
M. Jules Romains, of the Academie Franâise
Deux Mondes.
Salsette for the sake
pit,
51
Blacks. ...
will
chewing gum.
once had opposite
me
not even censure our
will
only note
that
has the effect of emphasizing the jaws, and that the
which come
to
mind evoke
the equatorial forest rather
than the procession of the Panathenaea ....
The
black race has not yet
produced, will neverjproduce, an Einstein, a Stravinsky, a Gershwin.
One
idiotic
comparison for another: since the prophet of the
Revue des Deux Mondes and other places
invites us to
between "widely separated" things, may
be permitted, Negro that
one being master of his
free associations) that his
am,
to think (no
voice has
less in
Once
parallels
common with the rustling of the oak of Dodo na
or even the vibrations of the cauldron
Missouri
draw
than with
the braying of a
ass.
again,
systematically defend our old
Negro
civilizations:
I they were courteous civilizations.
Sodie
real
problem, you
We are not men for whom
say,
it is
is
to return to them.
No,
a question of "either-or." For
repeat.
us, the
52
problemisjiot to make a Utopian and sterileattemprto repeat the

but to go beyond.
past,
It is
not a dead society that we want to
We leave that toThose wlio goTiTibT exohTisin. Nor

colonial society that
we wish
that ever rotted under the sun.
with the help of
all
to prolong, the
It is
our brother
is it
revive.
the present
most putrid carrion
new society that we must create,
slaves, a society rich
productive power of modern times,
warm with
all
with
all
the
the fraternity of
olden days.
For some examples showing that
this i s.possible,
we can
loo k to
the Soviet Union.
But
let
us return to
M.
One cannot say that
Jules
Romains:
the petty bourgeois has never read anything.
On the contrary, he has read everything, devoured everything.

Only, his brain functions
types of digestive systems.
after the fashion
It filters.
of certain elementary
And the filter lets through only
what can nourish the thick skin of the bourgeois's

Before
the arrival
of the French in their country, the Vietnamese
were people of an old culture, exquisite and

fact upsets the digestion
forgetting
refined.
To
recall this
of the Banque d'Indochine. Start the
m achine!
These Madagascans who

century ago were poets,
lips
clear conscience.
buttoned!
And
nately, there are
still
are being tortured today, less than a
artists,
silence
administrators? Shhhhh.^êepjôur
falls,
silence as
deep
as a safe!
Fortu-
the Negroes. Ah! the Negroes! Let's talk about
the Negroes!
All right,
About
let's
talk
about them.
the Sudanese empires?
Shango sculpture? That's

from
all
capitals.
all
About the bronzes of Benin?
right with
me;
it
will give us a
the sensationally bad art that adorns so
About African music.
Why not?
change
many European
AIMECESAIRE
53
And about what the first explorers said, what they saw.
Not
those who feed at the company mangers! But the d'Elbees, the
Marchais, the Pigafettas! And then Frobenius! Say, you know who
he was, Frobenius? And we read together: "Civilized to the marrow
.
of their bones!
The
idea of the barbaric
N egro
is
European
invention."
The
petty bourgeois doesn't
want
to hear
any
twitch of his ears he flicks the idea away.
The
idea,
an annoying
fly.
j^4
ccv-
V\5i
At^VV
^"^
m ore.
With
Therefore, comrade, you will hold as enemies
consistendy
not only
only prefects
who
sadistic
torture
and
loftily, lucidly,
governors and greedy bankers, not
colonists
who
flog,
not only corrupt,
check-licking politicians and subservient judges, but likewise and

for the
same
reason,
venomous
journalists, goitrous academics,
wreathed in dollars and stupidity, ethnographers
who go
in for
metaphysics, presumptuous Belgian theologians, chattering intellectuals
born stinking out of the thigh of Nietzsche, the
paternalists,
the embracers, the corrupters, the back-slappers, the lovers of

exoticism, the dividers, the agrarian sociologists, the hoodwinkers,
the hoaxers, the hot-air artists, the humbugs,
who, performing
and in general, all those
their functions in the sordid division
of labor for
the defense of Western bourgeois society, try in diverse ways
infamous diversions to
split
up the
forces
of Progress
means denying the very possibility of Progress

54
all
and by
even
if it
of them tools of
AIMECESAIRE
capitalism,
all
colonialism,
of them, openly or
all
of plundering
secretly, supporters
of them responsible,
all
hateful,
all
55
slave-traders, all
henceforth answerable for the violence of revolutionary action.
And sweep out all the obscurers, all the inventors of subterfuges,
the charlatans and tricksters, the dealers in gobbledygook. And do
not seek to know whether personally these gentlemen are in good
or bad faith, whether personally they have good or bad intentions.
Whether
Paul
personally
that
is,
in the private conscience
of Peter or
they are or are not colonialists, because the essential thing
that their highly problematical subjective
good
irrelevant to the objective social implications
perform
as
faith
of the
evil
is
is
entirely
work they
watchdogs of colonialism.
And in this connection, I cite as examples (purposely taken from

very different disciplines):
From Gourou,
his
book Les Pays
certain correct observations, there

thesis, biased
and unacceptable,
is
tropicaux, in which,
amid
expressed the fundamental
that there has never been a great
tropical civilization, that great civilizations have existed only in
temperate climates, that in every tropical country the germ of

civilization
comes, and can only come, from some other place
outside the tropics, and that

the biological curse of the
if the tropical
racists,
with the same consequences, a no
From
countries are not under
there at least hangs over them,

less effective
geographical curse.
the Rev. Tempels, missionary and Belgian, his "Bantu
philosophy," as slimy and fetid as one could wish, but discovered

very opportunely, as
to counteract the
Hinduism was discovered by
others, in order
"communistic materialism" which,
it
seems,
threatens to turn the Negroes into "moral vagabonds."
From
not from
the historians or novelists of civilization
thing)
this
one or that one, but from
(it's
all
the
same
of them, or
56
almost all
their
their false objectivity, their chauvinism, their sly racism,
depraved passion for refusing to acknowledge any merit in the
non-white
races, especially the
with monopolizing
From
black-skinned races, their obsession
glory for their
all
own
race.
the psychologists, sociologists et ai, their views
on
"primitivism," their rigged investigations, their self-serving generalizations, their
tendentious speculations, their insistence on the
marginal, "separate" character of the non- whites, and
although
each of these gentlemen, in order to impugn on higher authority

the weakness of primitive thought, claims that his
the firmest rationalism
own
is
based on
their barbaric repudiation, for the sake
of
the cause, of Descartes's statement, the charter of universalism, that
"reason ...
is
found whole and entire
individuals of the
same
in each
man," and that "where
species are concerned, there
may be degrees
in respect of their accidental qualities, but not in respect of their
forms, or natures."
But
let
us not go too quickly.
It is
worthwhile to follow a few of
these gentlemen.
I
shall
not dwell upon the case of the historians, neither the
historians of colonization nor the Egyptologists.
The
case of the
former is too obvious, and as for the latter, the mechanism by which
they delude their readers has been definitively taken apart by Sheikh
Anta Diop
in his
book Nations
book yet written by
negres et culture, the
Negro and one which
will
most daring
without question
play an important part in the awakening of Africa.
Let us rather go back.
Need
say that
it is
To M. Gourou,
from a lofty height
surveys the native populations,
to be exact.
that the
eminent scholar
which "have taken no part"
development of modern science?
And
that
it is
in the
not from the effort
of these populations, from their liberating struggle, from their
AIMECESAIRE
concrete fight for
freedom, and culture that he expects the
life,
salvation of the tropical countries to
colonizer
57
come, but from the good
since the law states categorically that "it
is
cultural
elements developed in non-tropical regions which are ensuring and

will ensure the progress
of the tropical regions toward a larger
population and a higher civilization."

I
have said that
vations:
"The
M. Gourou's book contains some correct obser-
tropical
environment and the indigenous
societies,"
he writes, drawing up the balance sheet on colonization, "have

suffered
from the introduction of techniques that
them, from corvees, porter
are
ill
adapted to
service, forced labor, slavery,
from the
transplanting of workers from one region to another, sudden changes

in the biological environment,
and
special
new
conditions that are
less favorable."
A fme record! The look on the university rector's face! The look
on
the cabinet minister's face
slipped his leash;

he's beginning:
now we're
"The
when he
in for
it;
reads that!
he's
Our Gourou has
going to
tell
everything;
typical hot countries find themselves faced
with the following dilemma: economic stagnation and protection

of the natives or temporary economic development and regression
of the natives." "Monsieur Gourou,
you a solemn warning:

stake."
in this
So our Gourou chooses
fying that,
if the
dilemma exists,
of the existing regime; that
this
game
to
it
if this
is
it is
very serious! I'm giving
your career which
back off and

exists
refrain
from
is
at
speci-
only within the framework
paradox constitutes an iron law,
only the iron law of colonialist capitalism, therefore of a society
it is
that
is
not only perishable but already in the process of perishing.
What impure and worldly geography!

If there
is
anything better,
it
plunder and torture in the Congo,
the Rev. Tempels. Let
is
let
them
the Belgian colonizer seize
all
58
the natural resources,

all
pride
consents to
Respect
let
let
him go
him stamp out
But take
all that.
as a dig at
them),
it
much
amiss)
say:
let
him crush
are going to the
(the great Belgian
Congo?
companies
do not say the freedom of the
do not say the Congolese nation
take
freedom,
might think that was subversive
natives (the Belgian colonists

I
You
care!
do not say native property
might take that
all
Reverend Father Tempels
in peace, the
You
(the Belgian
talk),
government might
Congo? Respect
are going to the
the Bantu philosophy!

"It
would be
really outrageous," writes the
white educator were to

particular
human
insist
spirit,
from considering him

against humanity,
on destroying
which
the black man's own,
the only reality that prevents us
an inferior being.
as
on the
is
Rev. Tempels, "if the
It
would be
a crime
part of the colonizer, to emancipate the
primitive races from that which
is
valid,
from that which constitutes
a kernel of truth in their traditional thought, etc."
What
generosity. Father!
Now then, know that

that
Bantu ontology
force
life
is
And what zeal!
Bantu thought
a divine decree,
must be
gains: the big
everybody
Bantu the
God and,
as
is
companies, the colonists,
ontological, the
Bantu only ask
for
of an ontological nature. Decent wages! Comfortable
of
all
and above
economic or material
and
that for the
except the Bantu, naturally.
housing! Food! These Bantu are pure

desire first
and
respected.
Since Bantu thought

satisfaction
forces;
which defines the world comes from
Wonderful! Everybody
the government
essentially ontological;
based on the truly fundamental notions of a
and a hierarchy of life
ontological order
is
all is
situation,
respect for their dignity as
spirits, I tell
you:
"What they
not the improvement of their
but the white man's recognition of
men,
their full
human value."
AIMfiCESAIRE
In short, you tip your hat to the Bantu

to the
immortal Bantu
soul.
life
force,
59
you give a wink
And that's all it costs you! You have to
admit you're getting off cheap!
As
why should it complain?
government,
for the
Tempels notes with obvious satisfaction, "from
Since, the Rev.
their first contact
with
the white men, the Bantu considered us from the only point of view
that was possible to them, the point ofview of their
Banm philosophy"
and ''integrated us into their hierarchy oflifeforces at a

In other words, arrange
the Belgian,
it
so that the white
god will take
the
for
takes his
and you have

the
responsibility for the Belgian colonialist order,
Bantu who dares
As
life forces,
You will have brought this miracle to pass:
trick.
"
level.
man, and particularly
and even more particularly Albert or Leopold,
place at the head of the hierarchy of Bantu
done the
very high
Bantu
and any
hand against it will he guilty ofsacrilege.

M. Mannoni, in view of his book and his observations on
Madagascan
to raise his
soul,
he deserves to be taken very
Follow him step by step through the

conjuring
tricks,
colonization
is
and he
will
ins
prove to you
seriously.
and outs of his

as clear as
based on psychology, that there are in
groups of men who, for
unknown
reasons, suffer
little
day that
this
world
from what must
be called a dependency complex, that these groups are psychologically
crave
made
it,
for dependence; that they
ask for
it,
demand
it;
that this
need dependence, that they

is
the case with most of the
colonized peoples and with the Madagascans in particular.
Away with racism! Away with colonialism! They smack too much
of barbarism.
M. Mannoni
has something better: psychoanalysis.
Embellished with existentialism,
most down-at-the-heel
as
it
gives astonishing results: the
cliches are re-soled for
you and made good
new; the most absurd prejudices are explained and justified; and,
as if by
magic, the
moon
is
turned into green cheese.
60
But
listen to
It is
him:
the destiny of the Occidental to face the obligation laid
down
by the commandment Thou shalt leave thyfather and thy mother. This
obligation
is
incomprehensible to the Madagascan. At a given time
in his development, every

.
European discovers
in himself the desire
to break the bonds of dependency, to become the equal of his
father.
The Madagascan,
He
never!
does not experience rivalry with
the paternal authority, "manly protest," or Adlerian inferiority
through which the European must pass and which are

forms ... of the initiation
Don't
dren."
They
You know the old refrain:

take
they dress
it,
The result
is
journey
may seem
see,
you
it
by which one achieves manhood
the subtleties of vocabulary, the
let
frighten you!
rites
Mannoni. Once
will find all
ordeals
like civilized
it
up
new
terminology,
"The-Negroes-are-big-chil-
for you, tangle
again, be reassured!
a bit difficult, but once
it
up
At the
you
your baggage again. Nothing
for you.
start
of the
get there, you'll

will
be missing,
not even the famous white man's burden. Therefore, give
"Through
ear:
these ordeals" (reserved for the Occidental), "one
tri-
umphs over the infantile fear of abandonment and acquires freedom

and autonomy, which
are the
most precious possessions and
also
the burdens of the Occidental."
And the Madagascan? you ask. A lying race of bondsmen, Kipling

would say. M. Mannoni makes his diagnosis: "The Madagascan
does not even try to imagine such a situation of abandonment.
He
desires neither personal
(Come
on,
you know how
They
what freedom
is.
white agitators
who
autonomy nor
it is.
free responsibility."
These Negroes can't even imagine
don't want
it,
they don't
put that into their heads.
them, they wouldn't
know what
to
do with
demand it.
And
it.)
if
It's
you gave
the
it
to
AIMECESAIRE
If
you point out
to
M. Mannoni
that the
61
Madagascans have
nevertheless revolted several times since the French occupation
again recently in 1947,
you
explain to
M. Mannoni,
that that
is
madness, a running amok;
and
faithful to his premises, will
purely neurotic behavior, a collective

that,
moreover, in
this case
question of the Madagascans' setting out to conquer
was not a
it
real objectives
but an "imaginary security," which obviously implies that the

oppression of which they complain
clearly, so insanely
monstrous ingratitude, according

Fijian
who
is
an imaginary oppression. So
imaginary, that one might even speak of

to the classic
burns the drying-shed of the captain
example of the
who
has cured
him of his wounds.

If
you
criticize the
populations to despair,
colonialism that drives the most peaceable
M. Mannoni
will explain to
you
that after
the ones responsible are not the colonialist whites but the colo-
all,
nized Madagascans.
Damn it all,
they took the whites for gods and
expected of them everything one expects of the divinity!

If you think the treatment applied to the
was a
will
trifle
rough,
M. Mannoni, who
Madagascan neurosis
has an answer for everything,
prove to you that the famous brutalities people talk about have
been very greatly exaggerated, that
it is all
neurotic fabrication, that
the tortures were imaginary tortures applied by "imaginary executioners."
As
for the
moderate, since
when
it
it
French government,
was content
it
showed
to arrest the
should have sacrificed ôm.,
if it
itself singularly
Madagascan
had wanted
deputies,
to respect the
laws of a healthy psychology.

I
am
not exaggerating.
Treading very
It is
M. Mannoni
classical paths, these
speaking:
Madagascans transformed
their saints into martyrs, their saviors into scapegoats; they
wanted
to
62
wash
their
imaginary sins in the blood of their
prepared, even at this price, or rather only at

attitude
seem
once more.
to be that, since
had
gods.
They were
this price, to reverse their
One feature of this dependent psychology would

no one can
should be sacrificed to the other.

in Tananarive
own
serve
two masters, one of the two
The most agitated of the colonialists
a confused understanding of the essence of this
psychology of sacrifice, and they demanded their viaims. They besieged

the
High Commissioner's
office, assuring
him
that if they
granted the blood of a few innocents, "everyone would be
This attitude, disgraceful from a
what
human
were
satisfied."
point of view, was based on
was, on the whole, a fairly accurate perception
of the emotional
disturbances that the population ofthe high plateaux was going through.
Obviously,
colonialists.
as
it is
only a step from this to absolving the bloodthirsty
M. Mannoni's "psychology" is as "disinterested," as "free,"
M. Gourou's geography or the Rev. Tempels'
missionary theology!
And the striking thing they all have in common is the persistent
bourgeois attempt to reduce the most human problems to comfortable,
hollow notions: the idea of the dependency complex in
Man-
noni, the ontological idea in the Rev. Tempels, the idea of "tropicality"
in Gourou. What has become of the Banque d'Indochine in all that?
And the Banque de Madagascar? And the buUwhip? And the taxes?
And the handful of rice to the Madagascan or the nhaque ? And
the martyrs? And the innocent people murdered? And the bloodstained money piling up in your coffers, gentlemen? They have
evaporated! Disappeared, intermingled,
become unrecognizable
in
the realm of pale ratiocinations.
But there
one unfortunate thing for these gentlemen.
is
their bourgeois masters are less
argument and
are
and
less
It is
that
responsive to a tricky
condemned increasingly to turn away from them
and applaud others who
are less subtle
and more
brutal.
That
is
63
AIMfiCESAIRE
precisely
what
gives
M.
neady arranged on the

offers
of service.
proven
Yves Fiorenne a chance.
tray
indeed, here,
Uttle
No possible surprises. Completely guaranteed, with
efficacy, fully tested
with conclusive
form of racism, a French racism

promising. Listen to the
"Our
And
of the newspaper Le Monde, are his
results,
here
not very sturdy,
still
man himself:
who has had
reader" (a teacher
we have
but
true,
it is
the audacity to contradict
the irascible M. Fiorenne), "... contemplating two young half-breed

girls,
her pupils, has a sense ofpride at thefeeling that there is a growing
Would her response
measure ofintegration with our Frenchfamily
be the same
if
she saw, in reverse, France being integrated into the
black family (or the yellow or red,

say,
becoming
It is clear
that for
difference), that
is
to
M. Yves Fiorenne it is blood that makes France,
and the foundations of the nation

genius, are
makes no
it
diluted, disappearing.^"
made of a
are biological: "Its people,
thousand-year-old equilibrium that
same time vigorous and
delicate,
and
is
its
at the
certain alarming distur-
bances of this equilibrium coincide with the massive and often
dangerous infusion of foreign blood which

over the
last thirty years."
In short, cross-breeding
crises!
humanism
world), but
"It
and
that
is
the enemy.
No more economic crises! All that is
course,
is
has had to undergo
it
let
loses
prestige (we are in the
itself in
the
human
that France will be universal,
universe, with
it is
defeat of Hitler!
And
ment
condemned, returning
vice, to
social
Of
Western
to be
chew over
it is
precisely in that that
Hitler's vomit.
to
it
its
blood
by remaining itself"
That is what the French bourgeoisie has come to,
lies:
more
left are racial crises!
us understand each other:
not by losing
its spirit,
none of its
No
as
five years after the
its
historic punish-
though driven by a
64
Because
after
all,
M. Yves Florenne was still ftissing over peasant

and
novels, "dramas of the land,"
a far
more
evil
stories
of the
eye when, with
evil
eye than the rustic hero of some tale of witchcraft,
"The supreme goal of the People-State
Hitler was announcing:
is
to preserve the original elements of the race which, by spreading

culture, create the beauty
and dignity of a superior humanity."
M. Yves Florenne is aware of this direct descent.

And he is far from being embarrassed by it.
Fine. That's his right.
As
it is
not our right to be indignant about
Because, after
we must
all,
say to ourselves, once

to
and for all,
become every day more
shameless,
it.
resign ourselves to the inevitable
that the bourgeoisie
snarling,
more openly
more summarily barbarous;
that
it is
is
and
condemned
ferocious,
more
an implacable law
that every decadent class finds itself turned into a receptacle into
which there flow

law that before
completely,
on
all
it
all
the dirty waters of history; that
disappears, every class
fronts,
and
that
it is
must
it is
first
a universal
disgrace itself
with their heads buried in the
dunghill that dying societies utter their swan songs.
The
dossier
indeed overwhelming.
is
A beast that by the elementary exercise of its vitality spills blood

and sows death
of this
fierce
the best
^you
remember
that historically
archetype that capitalist society
is
was in the form
revealed itself to
first
minds and consciences.
Sincethen the animal has become anemic,

hjde
it
it is
losing
no longer glossy, but the ferocity has remained,
with sadism.
and the
It is
others.
easy to blame
it
on Hider.
barely
mixed
On Rosenberg. On Jiinger
this:
"Everything in
this
world reeks of crime:
the newspaper, the wall, the countenance ormarL""
Baudelaire said that, before Hitler was born!
And
hair, its
On the SS.
But what about
Which
its
proves that the
Isidore Ducasse,
evil
has a deeper source.
Comte de Lautreamont!
65
^^
nî^^c
c/ê
66
In this connection,
it is
high time to dissipate the atmosphere of
scandal that has been created around the Chants de Maldoror.
Monstrosity? Literary meteorite?
Come, now!
The
How convenient
truth
is
that
DeHrium of a sick imagination?
it is!
Lautreamont had only to look the iron
man
forged by capitalist society squarely in the eye to perceive the

monster, the everyday monster, his hero.
No
one denies the veracity of Balzac.
But wait a moment: take Vautrin,

tropics, give
malaria, let
escort of
him
let
him be just back from

and the
the wings of the archangel
him be accompanied through
the
shivers
of
the streets of Paris by an
Uruguayan vampires and carnivorous
ants,
and you
will
have Maldoror.
The
setting
is
changed, but
it is
the
same world, the same man,
hard, inflexible, unscrupulous, fond, if ever a
man was, of "the flesh
of other men."
To digress for a moment within my digression,

day will come when, with
sources analyzed,
will
all
all
believe that the
the elements gathered together,
the circumstances of the
work
all
the
elucidated,
it
be possible to give the Chants de Maldoror a materialistic and
historical interpretation
which
will bring to light
unrecognized aspect of this frenzied epic,

tion of a very particular
form of society,
its
as
an altogether
implacable denuncia-
it
could not escape the
sharpest eyes around the year 1865.
Before that, of course, we will have had to clear away the occultist
and metaphysical commentaries

lish
that obscure the path; to re-estab-
the importance of certain neglected stanzas
strangest passage of all, the
evil
for example, that
one concerning the mine of lice,
we^will consent to see nothing
of the
more
or
less
in which
than the denunciation
power of goldhind the hoarding up of money;
to restore
AIMECESAIRE
to
its
true place the admirable episode of the omnibus,
to find in
it
very simply what
picture of a society in
refuse to
is
dl
and be willing
there, to wit, the scarcely allegorical
which the
privileged, comfortably seated,
move closer together so as to make room for the new arrival.
be
And
it
^who welcomes
said in passing
callously rejected?
The
the child
who has been
people! Represented here by the ragpicker.
Baudelaire's ragpicker:
Paying no heed to the spies of the cops, his
thralls,
He pours his heart out in stupendous schemes.

He takes great oaths and dictates sublime laws,
Casts
Then
it
will
down
the wicked, aids the victims' cause.
be understood, will
it
not, that the
enemy whom
Lautreamont has made the enemy the cannibalistic, brain-devouring

y
"Creator," the sadist perched
ment and
on "a throne made of human
gold," the hypocrite, the debauchee, the idler
excre-
who
"eats
the bread of others" and who from time to time is found dead drunk,
"drunk as a bedbug that has swallowed three barrels of blood during

the night,"
it
will
be understood that
one must look for that
him
creator,
it is
but that
in Desfosses's business directory
not beyond the clouds that
we
are
more
likely to find
and on some comfortable
executive board!
But
The
let
that be.
moralists can
do nothing about
\>Cji ether one l ikes it
it.
or not, the bourgeoisie, as a class, is condemned
to take responsibility for
all
the barbarism of history, the tortures of
the Middle Ages and the Inquisition, warmongering and the appeal
to the raison d'Etat, racism
which
it
and
slavery, in short everything against
protested in unforgettable terms at the time when, as the
attacking
class, it
wasjhe mcarnation pXhujni
progress.
;^]^VOA
68
The
moralists can
do nothing about
it.
progressive dehumanization in accordance with
the agenda of the bourgeoisie there

violence, corruption,
I
is
There
is
a law of
which henceforth on
nothing but
there can be
and barbarism.
almost forgot hatred, lying, conceit.
M. Roger Caillois.
Well then: M. Caillois, who from time immemorial has been given
I
almost forgot
the mission to teach a lax and slipshod age rigorous thought and dignified
M. Caillois,
Why?
style,
therefore, has just
been moved to mighty wrath.
Because of the great betrayal of Western ethnography which,
with a deplorable deterioration of its sense of responsibility, has been

using
all its
of Western
riority
Now at last M.
Europe has
critical
It is
Caillois takes the field.
this capacity for raising
up heroic saviors a t the most
moments.
unpardonable on our part not to remember M. Massis, who,
for the defense
We want to make sure that a better fate

in order to defend the
into a
the overall supe-
civilization over the exotic civilizations.
around 1927, embarked on a crusade
who,
upon
ingenuity of late to cast doubt
same sacred
is
of the West.
in store for
M.
Caillois,
cause, transforms his
pen
good Toledo dagger.
What did M.
of Western
He deplored the fact that "the destiny

and indeed the destiny of man," were now
Massis say?
civilization,
threatened; that an attempt was being
made on
to our anxieties, to challenge the claims
made for our culture,
into question the
most
essential part
all
sides "to appeal
to call
of what we possess," and he
swore to make war upon these "disastrous prophets."
M.
Caillois identifies the
"European
intellectuals"
who
enemy no
differently.
It
is
those
for the last fifty years, "because
of
AIMfiCfiSAIRE
exceptionally sharp disappointment

lessly
and
bitterness/'
69
have relent-
"repudiated the various ideals of their culture," and
who by
so doing maintain, "especially in Europe, a tenacious malaise."

malaise, this anxiety,
It is this
means
which M.
Caillois, for his part,
an end.
to put to
And indeed, no personage since the Englishman of the Victorian

age has ever surveyed history with a conscience
more serene and less
clouded with doubt.
His doctrine?
It
has the virtue of simplicity.
That the Westjnyentedjcience. That the West alone knows how

to think; that atjhe borders of the
Western world there begins the
shadowy realm of primitive thinking, which, dominated by the notion

of participation, incapable of logic,
At
this
point one gives a
start.
is
the very model of faulty thinking.
One reminds M.
Caillois that the
famous law of participation invented by Levy-Bruhl was repudiated
by Levy-Bruhl himself;
to the
that in the evening of his
that
was peculiar
was concerned";
that "these
view of
that,
on
minds do not
logic.
to the primitive mentality so far as logic
the contrary, he had

differ
from ours
become convinced
at all
from the point of
Therefore, [that they] cannot tolerate a formal
contradiction any more than we can
we
he proclaimed
world that he had been wrong in "trying to define a charac-
teristic,
as
life
Therefore, [that they] reject
do, by a kind of mental reflex, that which
is
logically
impossible."^
A waste of time! M. Caillois considers the rectification to be null

and void. For M.
Levy-Bruhl
who
Caillois, the true
says that primitive
Levy-Bruhl can only be the
man
talks raving nonsense.
Of course, there remain a few small facts that resist this doctrine.
To wit, the invention of arithmetic and geometry by the Egyptians.
To wit, the discovery of astronomy by the Assyrians. To wit, the
^^
-J
i^
70
among
birth of chemistry
To
the Arabs.
wit, the
appearance of
rationalism in Islam at a time when Western thought had a furiously

pre-logical cast to
But M.
it.
details in their place, since
which does not
fit
Caillois
it is
soon puts these impertinent
a strict principle that "a discovery
into a whole"
precisely,
is,
only a
detail, that is
to say, a negligible nothing.
As you can imagine, once off to such a good
start,
M.
Caillois
doesn't stop halfway.
Having annexed
Just think of it!
going to claim ethics too.
science, he's
M.
Caillois has never eaten anyone!
has never dreamed of finishing off an invalid!

to
M.
have
Caillois to shorten the days

it,
tries to
it is
It
M.
Caillois
has never occurred
of his aged parents! Well, there you
the superiority of the West: "That discipline of life which
ensure that the human person
is
sufficiently respected so that
not considered normal to eliminate the old and the infirm."
The
conclusion
inescapable:
is
compared
to the cannibals, the
dismemberers, and other lesser breeds, Europe and the West are the
incarnation of respect for
But
Algiers,
let
us
move
human
dignity.
on, and quickly,
lest
our thoughts wander to
Morocco, and other places where,
words, so
many
valiant sons
as
write these very
of the West, in the semi-darkness of
dungeons, are lavishing upon their inferior African brothers, with
such
tireless attention,
those authentic marks of respect for
human
dignity which are called, in technical terms, "electricity," "the
bathtub," and "the bottleneck."
Let us press on:

list
M.
Caillois has
not yet reached the end of his
of outstanding achievements. After
scientific superiority
and
moral superiority comes religious superiority.

Here,
M.
Caillois
is
careful not to let himself be deceived
by the
empty prestige of the Orient. Asia, mother of gods, perhaps. Anyway,
AIMECESAIRE
And
Europe, mistress of rites.
hand
outside of Europe
their "ludicrous
see
how wonderful
ceremonies of
on the one
it is:
the voodoo type, with
in
all
masquerade, their collective frenzy, their wild
alcoholism, their crude exploitation of a naive fervor," and
other hand
71
Europe
on
the
those authentic values which Chateaubri-
and was already celebrating
du
in his Genie
dogmas and mysteries of the Catholic
The
christianisme:
religion,
its
liturgy, the
symbolism of its sculptors and the glory of the plainsong."

Lastly, a final cause for satisfaction:
Gobineau
observes:
said:
"The only history is white." M.
Caillois, in turn,
"The only ethnography is white." It is the West that studies
the ethnography of the others, not the others
who
study the
ethnography of the West.
A cause for the greatest jubilation,

And the museums of which M.
minute does
it
cross his
mind
is it
not?
Caillois
is
so proud, not for
that, all things considered,
it
one
would
have been better not to have needed them; that Europe would have
done
better to tolerate the
leaving
them
lated; that
it
non-European
civilizations at
side,
its
dynamic and prosperous, whole and not muti-
alive,
would have been
better to let
them develop and
fulfill
themselves than to present for our admiration, duly labelled, their
dead and scattered

nothing; that
it
self-satisfaction rots the eyes,
withers the heart,

that
it
that
when
it
museum by
can say nothing,
a secret
all,
if its
only purpose
for others
up sympathy;
to feed the delights of
the honest contemporary of Saint Louis,
fought Islam but respected
it,
who
who
had a better chance of knowing it than
do our contemporaries (even

graphic literature),
is
dries
itself is
when smug
contempt
when racism, admitted or not,
means nothing
vanity; that after
anyway, the
parts; that
means nothing,
if
despise
they have a smattering of ethno-
it.
72
No,
in the scales of knowledge
never weigh so
And what
Let us be
Having
is
much
as
all
the
museums in the world will
one spark of human sympathy.
the conclusion of all that?
M.
fair;
Caillois
is
moderate.
established the superiority of the
West
in
all fields,
and
having thus re-established a wholesome and extremely valuable
M.
hierarchy,
Caillois gives
immediate proof of this superiority by
concluding that no one should be exterminated. With him the
Negroes are sure that they

not feed
will
for
bonfires.
not be lynched; the Jews, that they
There
is
just
one
thing:
it is
to be clearly understood that the Negroes, Jews,
it
lians
new
will
owe
this tolerance
magnanimity of M.
important
and Austra-
not to their respective merits, but to the
Caillois;
not to the dictates of science, which
can offer only ephemeral truths, but to a decree of

conscience,
which can only be
conditions,
no guarantees,
M.
Caillois's
absolute; that this tolerance has
unless
it
be
M.
Caillois's sense
no
of his duty
to himself.
Perhaps science will one day declare that the backward cultures
and retarded peoples which constitute so many dead weights and

impedimenta on humanity's path must be cleared away, but we
assured that at the critical
moment
the conscience of
M.
are
Caillois,
transformed on the spot from a clear conscience into a noble

conscience, will arrest the executioner's
salvus
arm and pronounce the
sis.
To which we
are indebted for the following juicy note:
For me, the question of the equality of races, peoples, or cultures

has meaning only
if
we
equality in fact. In the
are talking
about an equaHty in law, not an
same way, men who
are blind,
maimed,
sick,
feeble-minded, ignorant, or poor (one could hardly be nicer to the
non-Occidentals) are not respectively equal, in the material sense of
AIMECESAIRE
the word, to those
who
are strong, clear-sighted, whole, healthy,
The latter have greater capacities which,
intelligent, cultured, or rich.
by the way,
Similarly,
do not
whether
give
way
them more
but only more duties.
power, and value
level,
These differences
justify
rights
for biological or historical reasons, there exist at
present differences in
cultures.
73
among
an inequality in
entail
fact.
the various
They
in
no
an inequality of rights in favor of the so-called superior
peoples, as racism
would have
it.
Rather, they confer
upon them
additional tasks and an increased responsibility.
Additional tasks? What are they,
if not
What
Increased responsibility?
the tasks of mling the world?
is it, if
not responsibility for
the world?
And
Caillois-Atlas charitably plantsjhi^feet^firmly in the dust
and once again
raises to his sturdy shoulders the inevitable white
man's burden.
The
at
reader
such length.
must excuse
It is
me for having talked about M.
not that
the intrinsic value of his "philosophy"

able to judge
how
seriously
Caillois
overestimate to any degree whatever
the reader will have been
one should take a thinker who, while
claiming to be dedicated to rigorous logic, sacrifices so willingly to

prejudice
worth
and wallows
so voluptuously in cliches.
But
his views are
special attention because they are significant.
Significant of what?
Of the state of mind of thousands upon thousands of Europeans

or, to
be very precise, of the
state
of mind of the Western petty
bourgeoisie.
Significant of what?
Of this:
that at the very time
when
it
most often mouths the
word, the West has never been further from being able to
humanism
humanism made
to the
live a true
measure of the world.
One
of the values invented by the bourgeoisie in former times
and launched throughout the world was man
and we have
seen
what has become of that. The other was the nation.

It is
fact:
the nation
Exacdy; but
if I
that here too there
turn
is
is
a bourgeois
my attention
phenomenon.
from man
to nations,
great danger; that colonial enterprise
modern world what Roman imperialism was

the prelude to Disaster
is
note
to the
to the ancient world:
and the forerunner of Catastrophe. Come,
now! The Indians massacred, the Moslem world drained of itself,

the Chinese world defiled and perverted for a
Negro world
disqualified;
scattered to the wind;
reduced to a
price?
mighty voices
all this
wreckage,
mono logue, and you
The truth
is
think
good century; the
stilled forever;
all this
all
homes
waste, Jiumanity
that does not have
that this policy cannot but bring about the ruin
74
its
of
AIMECESAIRE
Europe
itself,
the void
it
and
that Europe, if
not careful, will perish from
it is
has created around itself
They thought they were only
slaughtering Indians, or Hindus,
or South Sea Islanders, or Africans.
They have
in fact overthrown,
one after another, the ramparts behind which European

could have developed
I
I
75
civilization
freely.
know how fallacious historical parallels are, particularly the one
am about
to draw. Nevertheless, permit
me to
quote a page from
Edgar Quinet for the not inconsiderable element of truth which

contains and which
Here
worth pondering.
is
it is:
People ask why barbarism emerged

I
believe
know
the answer.
obvious to everyone.
a certain
seemed
The system
number of
to
once in ancient
civilization.
is
not
was composed of
of countries which, although they
were even ignorant of each other, protected,
supported, and guarded one another.
Empire undertook
at
of ancient civilization
nationalities,
to be enemies, or
all
surprising that so simple a cause
It is
When
Roman
the expanding
conquer and destroy these groups of nations, the
dazzled sophists thought they saw at the end of this road humanity
human
spirit;
that these nationalities were so
many
triumphant in Rome. They talked about the unity of the

it
was only
dream.
bulwarks protecting
happened
It
Rome
itself
triumphal march toward a single
Thus when Rome,
civilization,
came
it
dikes that protected
against the
it
to pass that
human
it
alleged
its
had destroyed, one
the other, Carthage, Egypt, Greece, Judea, Persia, Dacia,
and Transalpine Gaul,
in
had
after
and Cisalpine
itself swallowed
ocean under which
it
up the
was
to
The magnanimous Caesar, by crushing the two Gauls, only paved

way for the Teutons. So many societies, so many languages extin-
perish.
the
guished, so
Rome, and
many cities,
rights,
in those places
homes
annihilated, created a void
around
which were not invaded by the barbarians,
barbarism was born spontaneously.
The vanquished Gauls changed
into
Bagaudes. Thus the violent downfall, the progressive extirpation of
it
76
individual
caused the crumbling of ancient
cities,
was supported by the various
edifice
civilization.
That social
by so many different
nationalities as
columns of marble or porphyry.
When,
living
men
of the wise
to the applause
columns had been demolished, the
and the wise men of our day
are
mighty ruins could have been
made
of the time, each of these
edifice
came crashing down;
trying to understand
still
in a
moment's
how
such
time.
And now
y y.
.^
^/^/
undermined
what
ask:
civilizations,
else
has bourgeois Europe done?
destroyed countries, ruined nationalities,
extirpated "the root of diversity."
The hour of the
has
It
barbarian
American hour. Violence,
is'
at
No more dikes, no more bulwarks.

The modern
hand.
barbarian.
excess, waste, mercantilism, bluff,
The
con-
formism, stupidity, vulgarity, disorder.

In 1913, Ambassador Page wrote to Wilson:
"The future of the world belongs
to us.
Now what
are
we
going to do with the leadership of the world presently when it clearly

falls
into our hands?"
And in
"What
1914:
Empire, presently,
this
are
we going
to
do with
this
England and
when economic forces unmistakably put the
leadership of the race in our hands?"
This Empire
And the others
And indeed, do you not see how ostentatiously these gentlemen
.
have just unfurled the banner of anti-colonialism?

''Aid to the disinherited countries, "says
old colonialism has passed." That's also
has
Truman. "The time of the
Truman.
Which means that American high finance considers that the time
come to raid every colony in the world. So, dear friends, here
you have
\
to be careful!
know
that
some of you,
disgusted with Europe, with
all
that
hideous mess which you did not witness by choice, are turning
oh!
AIMECESAIRE
in
no
toward America and
getting used to looking
that country as a possible liberator.
"What
"The
The
numbers
great
upon
11
you
a godsend!"
bulldozers!
think.
The massive investments of capital! The roads!
ports!"
"But American racism!"

"So what? European racism in the colonies has inured us to
And
there
we
are,
ready to run the great Yankee
it!"
risk.
So, once again, be careful!
American dominationr the only domination from_which one

never Jficovers.
mean from which one
never recovers unscarred.
And since you are talking about factories and industries, do you
not see the tremendous factory hysterically spitting out
its
cinders
in the heart of our forests or deep in the bush, the factory_for_the
productio n of lackeys; do you not see the prodigious mechanization,

the mechanization of man; the gigantic rape of everything intimate,
undamaged, undefiled
has
it,
still
managed
that, despoiled as
we
are,
our
to preserve; the machine, yts, have
human
spirit
you never seen
the machine for crushing, for grinding, for degrading peoples?
So
that the danger
So that unless,
(that
is,
immense.
in Africa, in the
at the gates
the gates
is
South Sea Islands, in Madagascar
of South Africa), in the West Indies (that
of America), Western Europe undertakes on
initiative a policy
for peoples
is,
at
own
of nationalities, a new policy founded on respect
and cultures
dying cultures or
its
raises
nay,
more
up new ones,
of countries and civilizations
(this
unless
unless
it
Europe galvanizes the
becomes the awakener
being said without taking into
account the admirable resistance of the colonial peoples primarily

symbolized
at present
by Vietnam, but
also
by the Africa of the
Rassemblement Democratique Africain), Europe will have deprived
78
itseljpf its last
chance^nd, with
its
own hands,
drawn,
the pall of mortal darkness.
Which comes down to saying that the salvation of Europe is not

a matter of a revolution in methods.
tion
It is
a matter
the one which, until such time as there
will substitute for the
it
a classless society,
narrow tyranny of a dehumanized bourgeoisie
the preponderance of the only class that
because
is
of the Revolu-
suffers in its flesh
from
all
still
has a universal mission,
the wrongs of history, from
the universal wrongs: the proletariat.
all
AN INTERVIEW WITH AIME CESAIRE

Conducted by Rene Depestre
The following interview withAime Cesaire was conducted by Haitian

poet
and militant Rene
Depestre at the Cultural Congress of Havana
in 1967. Itfirst appeared in Poesias,
published by Casa de
las
an anthology ofCesaire's writings
Americas. It has been translated fiom the
Spanish by Maro Riofrancos.
RENE DEPESTRE: The

Return
to
Lilyan Kesteloot has written that
critic
My Native Land
is
an autobiographical book.
Is this
opinion well founded?
AIME CESAIRE:
the
Certainly.
same time
it
is
an autobiographical book, but
It is
book
in
which
tried to gain
understanding of myself In a certain sense

truth than a biography.
person's book:
wrote
and had come back

contacts with
really
my
it
just after
closer to the
country
after
my studies
were my first
had finished
to Martinique.
At the same time
These
an absence of ten
sea
years, so
a deep anguish over the
felt
R.D.:
How old were you when you wrote the book?
A.C.:
R.D.:
Nevertheless,
must have been around

is
nventy-six.
striking about
81
of impressions and
prospects for Martinique.
what
an
You must remember that it is a young
found myself assaulted by a
images.
it is
at
it is its
great maturity.
82
A.C.:
It
my
was
that
first
published work, but actually
had accumulated, or done
ing written quite a few
poems
progressively.
But they have never been published.
A.C.:
They
haven't been published because
esting,
The
Why?
A.C.:
Because
to
whom
but they didn't
R,D.:
still
friends to
don't think
satisfy
wasn't very happy with
traditions,
inter-
me.
my own. I was
that was
under the influence of the French poets. In
My Native Land took the
remember hav-
showed them found them
had found a form
by chance. Even though
poems
contains
before these.
R.D.:
them.
it
short, {{Return
form of a prose poem,
wanted
to break with
it
was
French
truly
literary
did not actually free myself from them until the
my back on poetry. In fact, you could

say that I became a poet by renouncing poetry. Do you see what
moment I
decided to turn
mean? Poetry was for me the only way to break the stranglehold
the accepted French form held

R.D.:
on me.
In her introduction to your selected poems published by Editions

Seghers, Lilyan Kesteloot
names Mallarme, Claudel, Rimbaud,
and Lautreamont among the poets who have influenced you.

A.C.:
Lautreamont and Rimbaud were a great revelation
my
poets of
generation.
must
also say that
for
many
don't renounce
Claudel. His poetry, in Tete d'Or for example,
made
a deep
impression on me.
no doubt
R.D.:
There
AC:
Yes, truly great poetry, very beautiful. Naturally, there were many
is
that
it is
great poetry.
things about Claudel that irritated me, but
ered
him
a great craftsman with language.
have always consid-

83
AIMECfiSAIRE
R.D.:
Your Return
to
My
Land
Native
stamp of personal
bears the
experience, your experience as a Martinican youth,

deals with the itineraries
poet
express myself in French,
has influenced me. But
also
decisive.
don't deny French influences myself
as a
it
of the Negro race in the Antilles, where
French influences are not

A.C.:
and
Whether I want to or not,
and
clearly
French
literature
want to emphasize very strongly that
while using as a point of departure the elements that French

literature gave
me
at the
create a new language,
same time
have always striven to
one capable of communicating the African
heritage. In other words, for
to use in developing a
me French was
a tool that
wanted
new means of expression. I wanted to create
an Antillean French, a black French that, while still being French,
R.D.:
had
a black character.
Has
surrealism been instrimiental in your effort to discover this
new French
A.C.:
was ready
on
my
language?
to accept surrealism because
own, using
as
my starting
already
points the
had advanced
same authors
that
had influenced the surrealist poets. Their thinking and mine had
common
reference points. Surrealism provided
had been confusedly searching

because in
it I
for. I
traditional
have accepted
it
joyfully
have found more of a confirmation than a revela-
tion. It was a weapon that exploded the
up absolutely
me with what
French language.
It
shook
everything. This was very important because the
forms
burdensome, overused formswere
crush-
ing me.
R.D.:
This was what interested you in the
A.C.:
Surrealism interested
surrealist
movement
me to the extent that it was a liberating faaor.
84
R.D.:
So you were very
sensitive to the
concept of liberation that
surrealism contained. Surrealism called forth deep
and uncon-
scious forces.
A.C.:
Exactly.
And my
thinking followed these
apply the surrealist approach to
my
particular situation,
summon up these unconscious forces. This,

Africa.
said to myself:
it's
Well then,
lines:
for
me, was a
true that superficially
we are
if I
can
call to
French,
we bear the marks of French customs; we have been branded by

Cartesian philosophy, by French rhetoric; but
all
that, if
we plumb
if
we
we
the depths, then what
break with
will find
is
fijndamentally black.
was a process of disalienation.
R.D.:
In other words,
A.C.:
Yes, a process of disalienation, that's
R.D.:
That's
it
how surrealism
effort to reclaim
how I
interpreted surrealism.
has manifested itself in your work: as an
your authentic character, and in a way
as
an
effort to reclaim the African heritage.

A.C.:
Absolutely.
R.D.:
And
A.C.:
A plunge into the depths.
R.D.:
It
A.C.:
Yes,
as a process
of detoxification.
It
was a plunge into Africa
for
me.
was a way of emancipating your consciousness.

I felt
that beneath the social being
would be found
a pro-
found being, over whom all sorts of ancestral layers and alluviums
had been deposited.

R.D.:
Now, I would like to go back to the period in your life in Paris when
you collaborated with Leopold Sedar Senghor and Leon-Gontran
first
A.C.:
Yes,
Damas on
the small periodical
L 'Etudiant noir. Was
stage of the Negritude expressed in Return to

it
was already Negritude,
as
we
this the
My Native Land?
conceived of it then. There
were two tendencies within our group.
On the one hand,
there
AIMECESAIRE
were people from the
Communists
left,
85
such
at that time,
as J.
Monnerot, E. Lero, and Rene Menil. They were Communists,
and therefore we supported them. But very soon

proach them
and perhaps
owe
this to
Senghor
had
to re-
for being
French Communists. There was nothing to distinguish them
from the French
either
nists.
surrealists or
In other words, their
R.D.:
They were not attempting
A.C.:
In
from the French
poems were
Commu-
colorless.
disalienation.
my opinion they bore the marks of assimilation. At that time
Martinican students assimilated either with the French

or with the French
But
leftists.
it
rightists
was always a process of assimi-
lation.
R.D.:
At bottom what separated you from the Communist Martinican

students at that time was the
A.C.:
Yes, the
Negro question. At
nists for forgetting
criticized the
They
characteristics.
all right,
but they acted
Commuacted like
like abstract
maintained that the poHtical question could not
do away with our condition

great
that time
our Negro
Communists, which was

Communists.
Negro question.
number of historical
as
Negroes.
peculiarities.
have been influenced by Senghor in

absolutely nothing about Africa.
Soon
We are Negroes, with a

I
this.
suppose that
At the time
afterward
I
I
must
knew
met Senghor,
me a great deal about Africa. He made an enormous

impression on me: I am indebted to him for the revelation of
Africa and African singularity. And I tried to develop a theory to
and he
told
encompass
R.D.:
A.C.:
You have
Yes,
it is
all
of my
reality.
tried to particularize
Communism
a very old tendency of mine. Even then Communists
would reproach me
for speaking of the
Negro problem
they
86
called
my
it
we need
to
But
racism.
would answer: Marx
complete Marx.
R.D.:
Do
you
see a relationship
right,
but
that the emancipation of the
I felt
Negro consisted of more than
is all
just a political emancipation.
among
the
movements between the
nvo world wars connected to L 'Etudiant noir, the Negro Renaissance Movement in the United States,
and Negrismo
A.C.:
in
Cuba?
was not influenced by those other movements because I did not
know of them. But I'm

R.D.:
sure they are parallel movements.
How do you explain the emergence, in the years between the two
world wars, of these
Cuba,
States,
parallel
movements
Martinique,
Brazil,
tural particularities
A.C.:
La Revue indigene in Haiti,
etc.
in Haiti, the
that recognized the cul-
of Africa?
believe that at that time in the history of the
coming
itself in
to consciousness
movements
that
among
had no
world there was a
Negroes, and this manifested
relationship to each other.
R.D.:
There was the extraordinary phenomenon of jazz.
A.C.:
Yes, there
was the phenomenon of jazz. There was the Marcus
Garvey movement.
a child
R.D.:
A.C.:
remember very
well that even
when
was
had heard people speak of Garvey.
Marcus Garvey was
a sort of Negro prophet
whose speeches had
galvanized the
Negro masses of the United
was to take
the American Negroes to Africa.
He
United
all
inspired a mass
movement, and
States.
His objective
for several years
he was a
symbol to American Negroes. In France there was a newspaper

called
R.D.:
Le Cri des
negres.
believe that Haitians like Dr. Sajous, Jacques
Roumain, and
Jean Price-Mars collaborated on that newspaper. There were also
AIMECESAIRE
six issues
of La Revue du monde
written by
noir,
87
Rene Maran,
Claude McKay, Price-Mars, the Achille brothers, Sajous, and others.

A.C.:
remember very
well that around that time
of Langston Hughes and Claude McKay.
McKay was
describing the
1
life
in Paris.
poems
knew very well who
And McKay's
of dock workers in Marseilles
930. This was really one of the
first
therefore, that although
was not
novel. Banjo
was published
works in which an author
spoke of the Negro and gave him a certain

say,
read the
because in 1929 or 1930 an anthology of American
Negro poetry appeared
in
we
literary dignity. I
directly influenced
must
by any
American Negroes, at least I felt that the movement in the United

States created
clear
coming
came under
an atmosphere that was indispensable for a very
During the 1920s and 1930s
to consciousness.
three
was the French
main
influences, roughly speaking.
literary influence,
The
first
through the works of Mal-
larme,
Rimbaud, Lautreamont and Claudel. The second was
Africa.
knew very little about Africa, but I deepened my knowl-
edge through ethnographic studies.

R.D.:
believe that
to the
A.C.:
European ethnographers have made a contribution
development of the concept of Negritude.
Certainly.
And as for the third influence,
aissance Movement in the United States,
me directly but still created an
it
was the Negro Ren-
which did not influence
atmosphere which allowed
me to
become conscious of the solidarity of the black world.

R.D.:
At
that time
you were not aware,
for example, of developments
along the same lines in Haiti, centered around La Revue indigene
and Jean Price-Mars's book, Ainsiparla

A.C.:
No,
it
was only
later that I
I'oncle.
discovered the Haitian
and Price-Mars's famous book.
movement
88
R.D.:
How
would you
describe your encounter with Senghor, the
encounter between Antillean Negritude and African Negritude?
Was it the result of a particular event or of a parallel development

of consciousness?
A.C.:
It
was simply that
Negroes of diverse
in Paris at that time there
were a few dozen
There were Africans,
origins.
like
Senghor,
etc.
This was
Guianans, Haitians, North Americans, Antilleans,

very important for me.
R.D.:
In this circle of Negroes in Paris, was there a consciousness of the
importance of African culture?

A.C.:
Yes, as well as an awareness of the solidarity
among blacks. We had
come from
was our
different parts of the world. It
first
meeting.
We were discovering ourselves. This was very important.

R,D.:
It
was extraordinarily important.
How did you come to develop
the concept of Negritude?

A.C.:
have a feeling that
used the term

it
first,
in our group. It
it
was somewhat of a
that's true.
was
but
it's
possible
we
especially the
my generation,
French
of assimilation unrestrainedly.
had
talked about
really a resistance to the politics
lation. Until that time, until
English
But
collective creation.
of assimi-
the French
and the
followed the politics
We didn't know what Africa was.
Europeans despised everything about Africa, and in France people
spoke of a
civilized
world and a barbarian world. The barbarian
world was Africa, and the
civilized
world was Europe. Therefore
the best thing one could do with an African was to assimilate
him: the ideal was to turn him into a Frenchman with black skin.
R.D.:
Haiti experienced a similar
nineteenth century. There
phenomenon at the beginning of the
is
an entire Haitian pseudo-literature,
created by authors who allowed themselves to be assimilated.
independence of Haiti, our
first
The
independence, was a violent
AIMECESAIRE
89
attack against the French presence in our country, but our
authors did not attack French cultural values with equal force.
first
They
did not proceed toward a decolonization of their consciousness.

A.C.:
This
is
what
is
known
remember
a poor
little
Martini-
who passed the time writing poems and sonnets
can pharmacist
which he sent
I still
we were
In Martinique also
as bovarisme.
in the midst of bovarisme.
to literary contests, such as the Floral
Games of
He felt very proud when one of his poems won a prize.

One day he told me that the judges hadn't even realized that his
poems were written by a man of color. To put it in other words,
his poetry was so impersonal that it made him proud. He was
Toulouse.
with pride by something
filled
would have considered
a crush-
ing condemnation.
R.D.:
It
A.C.:
was a case of total
alienation.
think you've put your finger on
against alienation.
Antilleans were
sorts
Our struggle was
a struggle
That struggle gave birth to Negri tude. Because
ashamed of being Negroes, they searched
of euphemisms for Negro: they would say a
a dark-complexioned
R.D.:
Yes, real idiocies.
A.C.:
That's
It
it.
man, and other
when we adopted
the
word
man
for
all
of color,
idiocies like that.
term of defiance.
negre, as a
was a defiant name. To some extent it was a reaction of enraged
youth. Since there was shame about the word negre,
word
negre.
really
wanted
must say
to call
resistance to that
that
it
L 'Etudiant
among
negre,
but there was a great
the Antilleans.
R.D.:
Some thought
A.C.:
Yes, too offensive, too aggressive,
that the
we chose the
when we founded L 'Etudiant noir,
word
was
negre
offensive.
and then
took the liberty
of speaking o^ negritude. There was in us a defiant
found a violent affirmation
in the
words
negre,
and
will,
and we
nigritude.
90
R.D.:
In Return to
My Native Land yon have stated that Haiti was the
cradle of Negritude. In your words, "Haiti, where Negritude
stood on
its
feet for the first time."
history of our country
Negritude.
Then, in your opinion, the
in a certain sense the prehistory
is
of
How have you applied the concept of Negritude to
the history of Haiti?

A.C.:
my discovery of the North American Negro and my
Well, after
discovery of Africa,
world, and that
Martinique, but
for
is
went on
to explore the totality
how I came upon
it is
of the black
the history of Haiti.
love
an alienated land, while Haiti represented
me the heroic Antilles,
the African Antilles.
began to make
connections between the Antilles and Africa, and Haiti
most African of the Antilles.

a marvelous history: the
It is at
first
the
Negro
same time
epic of the
is
the
a country with
New World was
written by Haitians, people like Toussaint L'Ouverture, Henri
Christophe, Jean-Jacques Dessalines,
known
in Martinique.
know and love

R.D.:
Then
for
am
etc.
Haiti
is
not very well
one of the few Martinicans
Haiti.
you the
first
independence struggle in Haiti was a
confirmation, a demonstration of the concept of Negritude.

national history
A.C.:
is
people stood up for the
R.D.:
During
new world,
all
Our
Negritude in action.
Yes, Negritude in action. Haiti
to shape a
who
first
is
the country where
Negro
time, affirming their determination
a free world.
of the nineteenth century there were
men
in Haiti
who, without using the term Negritude, understood the
signifi-
cance of Haiti for world history. Haitian authors, such as Hannibal Price
and Louis-Joseph
Janvier,
were already speaking of
the need to reclaim black cultural and aesthetic values.

like
Antenor Firmin wrote
in Paris a
book
entitled
A genius
De
I'egalite
AIMECESAIRE
des races humaineSy in which
in Haiti in order to
that
was
he tried to re-evaluate African culture
combat the
characteristic
91
total
and
colorless assimilation
of our early authors.
You could
say that
beginning with the second half of the nineteenth century, some

Haitian authors
^Justin Lherisson, Frederic
began
Hibbert, and Antoine Innocent
of our country, the
arities
fact that
Marcelin, Fernand
to discover the peculi-
we had an African
the slave was not born yesterday, that
voodoo was an important
element in the development of our national culture.

necessary to examine the concept of Negritude
Negritude has lived through
all
its
oi Return
I
would
places
whose
its
closely.
I
from those
My Native Land.
to
like to say that
everyone has his
own
much
to overdo
out of a sense of modesty. But
it,
Negritude. There
theorizing about Negritude.

if
have tried not
someone
asks
have been
lived,
telling
you about
What
we
the atmosphere in which
an atmosphere of assimilation in which Negro people were
ashamed of themselves
has great imponance.
atmosphere of rejection, and we developed an

plex.
me
my conception of Negritude is, I answer that above all it is
a concrete rather than an abstract coming to consciousness.

I
don't
original sense,
objectives are very different
has been too
what
more
it is
explosive nature. In fact, there are people today in Paris
and other
A.C.:
Now
kinds of adventures.
believe that this concept is always understood in
with
past, that
have always thought that the black
his identity.
And
has seemed to
it
establish this identity, then
ness of what
we are
are black; that
that
we were
is,
of the
inferiority
an
com-
man was searching for
me that
we must have
We lived in
if what
we want
to
is
a concrete conscious-
first fact
of our
lives:
that
we
black and have a history, a history that
contains certain cultural elements of great value; and that
Ne-
92
groes were not, as
you put
born yesterday, because there have
it,
been beautiful and important black
began
civilizations.
At the time we
of world
to write, people could write a history
civilization
without devoting a single chapter to Africa,
as if Africa
no contributions
we
to the world. Therefore
had made
affirmed that
we
were Negroes and that we were proud of it, and that we thought
that Africa
was not some
sort
of blank page in the history of
humanity; in sum, we asserted that our Negro heritage was
worthy of respect, and that

past, that its values
this heritage
was not relegated
to the
were values that could still make an important
contribution to the world.

R.D.:
That
A.C.:
Universalizing, living values that had not been exhausted.

field
is
to say, universalizing values
was not dried up:
effort to irrigate
was the
could
it
still
bear fruit
with our sweat and plant
it
situation: there
were things to
tell
if
new
we made
the
So
this
seeds.
the world.
We were
not dazzled by European
civilization.
We
European
we thought
that Africa could
civilization
but
contribution to Europe.
ity.
That's the way
happening to
its
was:
my brothers
repercussions in me.
ferent to
we
it
was
It
came
there was a
and the United
understood that
States
had
could not be indif-
in Haiti or Africa.
Then,
in a way,
of a sort of black civilization spread
And
have come to the realization that
"Negro situation" that existed in different geographi-
cal areas, that Africa
was
also
my country. There was the African
continent, the Antilles, Haiti; there were Martinicans

zilian
make
an affirmation of our solidar-
in Algeria
to the idea
throughout the world.
bore the imprint of
have always recognized that what was
what was happening
slowly
also
The
Negroes,
etc.
and Bra-
That's what Negritude meant to me.

AIMECESAIRE
R.D.:
93
There has also been a movement that predated Negritude itself

I'm speaking of the Negritude movement between the two world
wars
movement you could call pre-Negritude, manifested by
among European
the interest in African art that could be seen

painters.
pean
A.C.:
Do you see a relationship between the interest of Euro-
artists
and the coming
Certainly. This
movement
to consciousness of Negroes?
another factor in the development
is
of our consciousness. Negroes were made fashionable in France
by
R.D.:
Picasso,
Vlaminck, Braque,
During the same period,

ple Paul
Guillaume
etc.
art lovers
in France
and art historians
and Carl Einstein
in
for
exam-
Germany
were quite impressed by the quality of African sculpture. African

art ceased to
be an exotic curiosity, and Guillaume himself came
to appreciate
of the
also
A.C.:
R.D.:
It
I
it
as the "life-giving
sperm of the twentieth century
spirit."
remember
the Negro Anthology of Blaise Cendrars.
was a book devoted to the
oral literature
of African Negroes.
can also remember the third issue of the
which had a number of articles by the
art journal Action,
artistic
time on African masks, sculptures, and other
vanguard of that
art objects.
shouldn't forget Guillaume Apollinaire, whose poetry

evocations of Africa.
To sum
up, do
you think
And we
is hill
of
that the concept
of Negritude was formed on the basis of shared ideological and

political beliefs
on the
Negritude, the
first
ferent path
intellect
part of its proponents?
Your comrades
in
militants of Negritude, have followed a dif-
from you. There
is,
for example, Senghor, a brilliant
and a fiery poet, but full of contradictions on the subject
of Negritude.

94
A.C.:
Our
afFinities
were above
all
black or did not
feel black.
Negritude was,
after
moment
all,
a matter of feeling.
But there was
part of the
left. I
placed us on the
We both felt, Senghor and

left,
but both of us
either felt
never thought for a
come from
that our emancipation could
that's impossible.
You
also the political aspect.
I,
the right
that our liberation
reftised to see the black
question as simply a social question. There are people, even

today,
who
of the
left
thought and
still
think that
it is all
taking power in France, that with a change in the
economic conditions the black question

never agreed with that at
is
R.D.:
simply a matter
important, but
it is
all. I
will disappear.
have
think that the economic question
not the only thing.
Certainly, because the relationships between consciousness

reality are
extremely complex. That's
to decolonize
our minds, our inner
why it is
life,
at the
and
equally necessary
same time
that
we
decolonize society.
A.C.:
Exacdy, and
Communists
remember very well having said
to the Martinican
in those days, that black people, as
you have
pointed out, were doubly proletarianized and alienated: in the

first
place as workers, but also as blacks, because after
dealing with the only race which
humanity.
is
all
we
are
denied even thejiotion of
"
[Notes]
by Robin D.G. Kelley
AUTHOR'S NOTE:
essay; to
to
Christopher Phelps for inviting
an
me
earlier draft,
to
come
to
and for
his untiring support; to Cedric
2.
Judith MacFarlane for her wonderful
Corsiglia with love
and
Robinson for
and
exact translations; to Elleza
essay
and gratitude for our
is
dedicated
to
and
Ted Joans and
"Discourse on Theloniolism.
The first edition was published in 1 950 by Editions Reclame. A revised and
expanded
edition, published
translated
and published by Monthly Review
by Presence
Afi-icaine in
1955, was
later
Press in 1972.
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, translated by Constance Farrington
3.
write this
terms with Cesaire's critique ofMarxism in the first place;
Diedra for cultivating the Marvelous. This
Laura
me to
Franklin Rosemontfor passing along key documents, commenting on
correcting
forcing
Mad props to
(New York: Grove
Press, 1967), p. 102.
Robert Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (London:
Routledge, 1990), p. 119.
which has influenced

studies,
is
my
compelHng defense of
thinking on this
Cesaire's Discourse,
text's relation to postcolonial
Bart Moore-Gilbert, Postcolonial Theory: Contexts, Practices, Politics
95
96
He argues that Discourse not only anticipated

by Homi Bhabha, Edward Said, Wilson Harris, Chinua
(London: Verso, 1997).

Fanon, but works
Achebe, and Chinweizu.

4.
See, for example, A.
and Poetics ofAime
M.A.M.
Ngal,
James Arnold, Modernism and Negritude: The Poetry
Cesaire (Cambridge:
Aime
Cesaire:
Harvard University
Un Homme a
la recherche
Press, 1981);
dune patrie
(Dakar:
Nouvelles Editions Africaines, 1983); Lilyan Kesteloot and B. joichy,Aime

Cesaire,
L'Homme
Pallister,
Aime
kin,
Aime
et
Cesaire
Voeuvre (Paris: Presence Africaine, 1973); Jane L.
(New York: Twayne
Cesaire: Black
Publishers, 1991); Susan Frut-
Between Worlds (Miami: Center for Advanced
International Studies, 1973).

5.
6.
Arnold, Modernism
and Negritude,
pp. 1-8, quote from page 8.
Quote from "An Interview with Aime

Discourse p. 85; Arnold,
Cesaire" appended at the end of
Modernism and Negritude, pp.
8-9;
on black
diasporic intellectuals in Paris, see Tyler Stovall, Paris Noir: African-Ameri-
cans in the City ofLight (Boston
and
Brent Edwards, "Black Globality:
New York: Houghton Mifflin,
The
lectual Culture," (Ph.D. dissertation,

7.
and
Africa
Pallister,
8
9.
Columbia
Maryse Conde, "Cahier d'un retour au pays

(Paris: Hatier,
University, 1997).
natal": Cesaire, Analyse critique
Norman Shapiro, ed., Negritude: Black Poetry from

Caribbean (New York: October House, 1970), p. 224;
1978);
the
Aime
1996);
International Shape of Black Intel-
Cesaire, pp. xiii-xiv.
Arnold, Modernism and Negritude, pp. 12-13.

"Lettre
du Lieutenant de
directeur de
vaisseau Bayle, chef du service d'information, au
revue Tropiques, Fort-de-France,
la
"Reponse de Tropiques a M.
May
12, 1943," (signed
Aristide
le
Aime
May
10,
1943" and
Lieutenant de vaisseau Bayle, Fort-de-France,

Cesaire,
Suzanne Cesaire, Georges Gratiant,
Maugee, Rene Menil, Lucie Thesee), Tropiques,
vol.
ed.
by Aime
Cesaire [facsimile reproduction] (Paris: Editions Jean-Michel Place, 1978),
Documents-Annexes, pp.
10.
xxxvi-xxxviii.
See Michael Richardson, ed., Refusal of the Shadow: Surrealism
and
the
Caribbean, trans, by Michael Richardson and Krzysztof Fijalkowski (Lon-
don: Verso, 1996), pp. 7-15, 69-182; Franklin Rosemont,

Breton
What
is
Surrealism?: Selected Writings
1978), pp. 83-92; Arnold, Modernism
(New
and Negritude,
ed.,
Andre
York: Pathfinder,
pp. 12-13.
NOTES
11.
Quote from Penelope Rosemont,
ed., Surrealist
Women: An
Anthology (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998),
97
International
137; Franklin
p.
Rosemont, "Suzanne Cesaire: In the Light of Surrealism," (unpublished

paper in author's possession).
12.
Penelope Rosemont,
Us:
943"
is
pp. 123-26, but

13.
prefer
Women, pp. 136-37. "Surrealism and
ed.. Surrealist
also reprinted in
Michael Richardson, ed.. Refusal ofthe Shadow,
Rosemont's
translation.
Brent Hayes Edwards offers an illuminating description of Cesaire's poetic

challenge to surrealism.
Surrealism,
like to
While he
sees Cesaire's
work
as a departure
from
think of it as a transformation. Brent Hayes Edwards,
"Ethnics of Surrealism," Transition!^ (1999), pp. 132-34.

14.
Jacqueline Leiner, "Entretien avec A.C.," in Tropiques, vol.
1,
ed.
by Aime
Cesaire [facsimile reproduction] (Paris: Editions Jean-Michel Place, 1978).
Aime
15.
Pallister,
16.
Reprinted
as
Cesaire, pp. 29-33.
"Poetry and Knowledge" in Michael Richardson, ed.. Refusal
of the Shadow, pp 134-145.

.
17.
Rosemont,
ed.,
Andre Breton
What
Nadeau, The History ofSurrealism,
trans,
Belknap Press of Harvard University
Surrealism?, pp. 36-37;
is
by Richard Howard (Cambridge:
Press,
"Murderous Humanitarianism," reprinted

Surrealism: Revolution Against Whiteness 9
document
first
1989, orig. 1944),
in Race Traitor
(Summer
appeared in Nancy Cunard,
York, 1996 reprint,

18.
Maurice
ed.,
p.
1998), pp. 67-69.
Negro:
117;
Special Issue
The
An Anthology (New
orig. 1934).
Cedric J. Robinson, "Fascism and the Response of Black Radical Theorists"

(unpublished paper in author's possession); Cedric
J.
Robinson, "Fascism
and the Intersection of Capitalism, Racialism, and Historical Consciousness,"

J.
Humanities in Society
3, no.
6 (Autumn 1983), pp. 325-49; Cedric
Robinson, "The African Diaspora and the Italo-Ethiopian
and
Class 27, no.
2 (Autumn 1985), pp. 51-65; W.E.B.
Autobiography of W.E.B.
Du Bois,
ed.
Ganuary 1936),
p. 31;
West
Africa," fournal
W.E.B.
Race
The
by Herbert Aptheker (New York:
International Publishers, 1968), pp. 305-6; Ralph

British Imperialism in
Crisis,"
Du Bois,
Du Bois,
J.
Bunche, "French and
of Negro History 21, no.
The World and Africa (New York:
International Publishers, 1947), p. 23.

1 9.
Cesaire, Senghor,
fascinated with
and their colleagues in the Negritude movement had been
Leo Frobenius, the German
irrationalist
whose massive
98
ethnography, Histoire de la civilisation africaine, provided a powerful defense
of African civihzation. See Suzanne Cesaire, "Leo Frobenius and the Prob-
lem of Civilization [1941],"
in
Michael Richardson,
ed., Refusal
of the
Shadow, pp. 82-87; L.S. Senghor, "The Lessons of Leo Frobenius," in Leo
Frobenius:
An
Anthology, ed. E, Haberland (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner
Verlag, 1973), p.
20.
Aime Cesaire,
vii;
Jacqueline Leiner, "Entretien avec A.C."
"Introduction to Victor Schoelcher," Esclavage
(Paris: Presses Universitaires
de France, 1948),
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks,
trans,
p. 7; also
by Charles
et colonisation
quoted in Frantz
Lam Markmann (New
York: Grove Press, 1967), 130-31.

21.
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks,
22.
Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making ofthe Black Radical Tradition
23.
Arnold, Modernism
(Chapel Hill,
24.
NC:
p. 130.
University of North Carolina Press, 2000).
and Negritude,
p. 14, pp.
Cesaire: Black
Between Worlds, pp. 26-27.
Aime Cesaire,
Letter to
Maurice Thorez
(Paris:
169-70; Susan Frutkin,
Aime
Presence Africaine, 1957), p.
6, p. 7, pp. 14-15.
25
Manthia Diawara, In Search ofAfrica (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,

1998), pp. G-7. Although the specific topic of Diawara's essay
Sartre's
"Black Orpheus," he
is
is
Jean-Paul
speaking generally here about a whole body
of literature that includes works by Cesaire and Fanon.
[Notes]
by Aime Cesaire
This
in
is
a reference to the account of the taking of Thuan-An
Le Figaro
vie,
September 1883 and
in
"Then the
son oeuvre.
is
quoted
great slaughter
in
which appeared
N. Serban's book,
had begun. They had
Loti, sa
fired in
double-salvos!
and
so easy to aim,
come down on them twice a minute, surely and methodically,
on command.
it
was a pleasure
comical
of bullets, that were
We saw some who were quite mad and stood up seized
with a dizzy desire to run.

this race
to see these sprays
They zigzagged, running every which way in
with death, holding their garments up around their waists in a
way
and then we amused ourselves counting the dead,
2.
A railroad line connecting Brazzaville with the port of Pointe-Noire.
3.
In classical mythology Silenus was a satyr, the son of Pan.

foster-father of Bacchus, the
god of wine, and is described as
etc."
(Trans.)
He was
a jolly old
the
man,
usually drunk. (Trans.)

4.
Not
bad fellow
at
bottom,
as later events
proved, but on that day in an
absolute frenzy.
5.
Jules
Romains
is
adopted in 1953.
the
pseudonym of Louis
Salsette
is
a character in
Farigoule,
which he
one of his books,
legally
Salsette Discovers
America (1942, translated by Lewis Galantiere). The passage quoted, however,
99
100
appears only in the expanded second edition of the book, published in
France in 1950. (Trans.)
The
responses of the celebrated Greek oracle at
the rustling of the leaves of a sacred oak tree.
Dodona were
of the temple, consisted of a brass figure holding in

of chains, which,
when
hand
its
by the wind, struck
agitated
revealed in
The cauldron, a famous treasure

a
whip made
a brass cauldron,
producing extraordinarily prolonged vibrations. (Trans.)
From
the opening pages of Descartes's Discours de la methode, as translated
by Arthur Wollaston
in the
Penguin edition (1960). (Trans.)
See Sheikh Anta Diop, Nations negres et culture, published by Editions

Presence Africaine (1955). Herodotus having declared that the Egyptians
were originally only a colony of the Ethiopians, and Diodorus Siculus having
repeated the same thing and aggravated his offense by portraying the
way that no mistake was
Ethiopians in such a
possible ("Plerique omnes, "to
quote the Latin translation, "niro sunt colore, facie sima,

III,
Section 8),
it
was of the
greatest
That being granted, and almost

set
it,
at the risk
assertion:
"The Egyptians
to say, whites like the Lydians, the Getulians, the
languages,
all
probability,
more
are Hamites, that
Moors, the Numidians,
the Berbers"; Maspero's method, which consists of
contrary to
of no longer being
there were several ways of accomphshing the task. Gustave
Le Bon's method, blunt, brazen

is
"Book
the Western scholars having deliberately
all
out to tear Egypt away from Africa, even
able to explain
crispis capillis,
importance to mount a counterattack.
making
a connection,
between the Egyptian language and the Semitic
especially the
Hebrew-Aramaic
the conclusion that originally the Egyptians
type,
from which follows
must have been Semites;
Weigall's method, geographical this time, according to which Egyptian

civilization
it
could only have been born in Lower Egypt, and that from there
passed into
Upper Egypt,
not travel
down
why
was impossible
this
{sic)
traveling
up the
river
is
that
the Negroes. In this connection,
Lower Egypt
is
in
interesting to
it is
and fauna of Egypt, which he
which
that
am
could
near the Mediterranean,

is
near the country of
oppose to Weigall's
the views of Scheinfurth {Au coeur de I'Afrique, vol.
It is clear
it
The reader will have understood that the secret reason
hence near the white populations, while Upper Egypt
flora
seeing that
1)
on the
thesis
origin of the
places "hundreds of miles upriver."
not attacking the Bantu philosophy here, but the
certain people try to use
it
for poHtical ends.
way
NOTES
0.
The name given by the French to
the people of Indochina
101
U.S. "gook")
(cf.
(Trans.)
1 1
Isidore Ducasse
the
Comte de Lautreamont
title
precursor of surrealism who,
unknown during
1870) had great influence on a
later
for a single extraordinary

in prose
whose
pen name
his brief lifetime
generation of poets.
is
^was a
(1846-
He is remembered
in violent rebellion against
poem
God and society.
episodes through which Maldoror passes are a series of
and
fantastic visions, occasionally mystic
macabre, and
work, the Chants de Maldoror, a kind of epic
satanic hero
The disconnected
is
erotic, filled
more
lyrical,
with sadism and vampirism.
often grotesque,
The work as a whole
has the intensity of a nightmare and seems almost to spring directly from
the author's subconscious. (Trans.)
12.
Vautrin,
who
arch-villain
appears in Le Pere Goriot (1834) and other novels,
of Balzac's Comedie humaine.
guise of a former tradesman, he

in his pursuit of fortune.
sets himself as
is
is
the
A master criminal living under the
corrupt, unscrupulous,
and single-minded
With cynical insight into capitalist society, Vautrin
no more immoral than the respectable bourgeois of his time.
(Trans.)
13.
From "Le Vin
des chififonniers" in Les Fleurs
du mal,
as translated
by C.
F.
Maclntyre. (Trans.)
14.
See Roger Callois, "Illusions a rebours," Nouvelle Revue Frangaise, December
and January 1955.

15.
It is
significant that at the very time
when M.
crusade, a Belgian colonialist review inspired

Afrique, no. 6, January 1955),
Caillois
was launching
his
by the government {Europe-
was making an absolutely
identical attack
on
ethnography: "Formerly, the colonizer's fundamental conception of his

relationship to the colonized
man was
Thus
a hierarchy, crude
colonization rested
clear." It
certain
is
M.
that of a civilized
this hierarchical relationship that the
Leiris
and Claude
for having written, in his

'It is
Levi-Strauss.
pamphlet La Question
childish to try to set
up
to a savage.
author of the
He
M.
of cultures, by considering them
article,
Caillois,
he
reproaches the former
raciale
devant
a hierarchy of culture."
for having attacked "false evolutionism," because

diversity
man
no doubt, but firm and
Piron, accuses ethnography of destroying. Like
blames Michel
moderne:
on
la science
The
latter
"tries to
suppress the
as stages in a single
development
it
which, starting from the same point, should make them converge toward
02
the same goal." Mircea Eliade comes in for special treatment for having dared
"The European no longer has
to write the following:
but interlocutors.
It is
well to
know how
natives before him,
to begin the dialogue;
it
is
indispensable to recognize that there no longer exists a solution of continuity
between the so-called primitive or backward world and the modern Western
world." Lastly,
it is
for excessive egalitarianism, for once, that
Otto
thinkers are taken to task
Columbia University, having declared:

the other cultures as inferior to our
Decidedly,
16.
M.
Caillois
is
in
American
Klineberg, professor of psychology at

"It
own
is
fundamental error to consider
simply because they are different."
good company.
Les Garnets de Lucien Levy-Bruhl, Presses Universitaires de France, 1949.
PRAISE
FOR
THE
"The force of [Frantz] Fanon and a
stylistic
"Cesaires essay stands as an important
consciousness a process in which
FIRST
EDITION
elegance unique to himself.
."
.
CHOICE
document in the development of third world
[he] played a
prominent
role."
ISBN:
LIBRARYJOURNAL
1-58367-025-4
5
9781 583"670255
0000

Discourse On Colonialism (2000)

Hochgeladen von

Dokumentinformationen

Originaltitel

Copyright

Verfügbare Formate

Dieses Dokument teilen

Dokument teilen oder einbetten

Freigabeoptionen

Stufen Sie dieses Dokument als nützlich ein?

Sind diese Inhalte unangemessen?

Copyright:

Verfügbare Formate

Discourse On Colonialism (2000)

Hochgeladen von

Copyright:

Verfügbare Formate

DISCO

NEW INTRODUCTION BY R O BlI P^P Q KELLEY

Copyright 1972, 2000 by Monthly Review Press

Originally published as Discours sur

Library of Confess Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A poetics of anticolonialism / Robin D.G.

Robin D.G. Kelley

JV51 .C4 13 2000

122 West 27th Street

Robin D.G. Kelley

AN INTERVIEW WITH AIME

Aime Cesaire's Discourse on

Colonialism might be best described as

would almost call it a "third world manifesto,"

but hesitate because

primarily a polemic against the old order

of the kind of propositions and

earlier in their little manifesto. First

old empires were

on the verge of collapse, thankshi ^rt to a world war a gainst fascism

manifestos. Yet, Discourse speaks in revolutionary ca-

dences, capturing the spirit of

proposals that generally

and philosophical shambles.

America. Five years

1945, black people from around the

globe gathered in Manchester, England, for the Fifth Pan-African

from the Non-Aligned Nations gathered in

Bandung, Indonesia, to discuss the freedom and future orthe third

India, the Philippines,

Bien Phu. Revolt was

Guyana, Egypt, Guatemala, South

Africa, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia,

Cameroon, and Madagascar, and

humiliating defeat by the Viet

The French encountered

Harlem, you name it. Revolt!

described this extraordinary

decade from the end of the Second World

to the late 1950s,

indisputably one of the key texts in

^works that include

produced during the

Democracy (1945) and The World andAfrica (1947), Frantz Fanon's

Communism?: The Coming

Struggle for Africa (1956), Albert

Memmi's The Colonizer and the Colonized {1957), Richard Wright's

Listen! (1957), Jean-Paul Sartre's essay, "Black

pheus" (1948), and journals such

as Presence Africaine 2ind African

much of the radical literature produced during this

epoch. Discourse places the colonial question front and center.

Although Cesaire, remaining somewhat

never quite dethrones the

exalted status as a revolutionary force, the

on the very concept of

and most importantly, on the

Hegelian fashion, Cesaire demonstrates

"decivilize" the colonizer: torture, violence, race hatred,

an d immorality consti tute a dead weight on the so-called

instruments of colonial power rely on barbaric, brutal

violence and intimidation, and the end result

Europe itself Hence Cesaire can only scream: "Europe is indefensible."