Aimé Césaire: Homage to Frantz Fanon

Homage to Frantz Fanon

Aimé Césaire

Frantz Fanon is dead. We expected this for many months, but against all reason,

we were hopeful. We knew him as such a determined person, capable of

miracles, and as such a crucial figure on the horizon of men. We must accept

the facts: Frantz Fanon is dead at age 37. A short life, but extraordinary. Brief,

but bright, illuminating one of the most atrocious tragedies of the 20th century

and detailing in an exemplary manner the human condition, the condition of

modern man. If the word “commitment” has a meaning, then it is embodied in

the person of Frantz Fanon. He was called “an advocate of violence, a terrorist.”

And it’s true Fanon appointed himself the theoretician of violence, the sole

weapon of the colonized against the barbarism of colonialism.

Fanon and the Caribbean

C.L.R. James speaking at a Special meeting of the United Nations Special Committee against Apartheid, 3 November 1978,  Marxists.Org

When I was asked to speak, I was invited to submit a paper. I said that in 60 years of public speaking I had not done that and I was not prepared to start here, because I really did not know who was speaking with me and who would be listening. It is not possible to present a paper under those circumstances. As I look around, I notice that on the platform there are lots of heads of departments or members of Governments. Most of the other speakers are professors from universities. I find this combination a rather unusual one. I would have liked to hear from the platform a Portuguese voice. The voice would have been translated and we would have understood a little more about Fanon. I would have liked to hear from among the audience a man like Wole Soyinka from Africa and another man from the Caribbean called Walter Rodney. I am sure we would have immensely benefitted by what they would have had to say about Fanon. That was the reason why as a habit I do not present papers but I am going to say more or less what I have to say now and I will tell you the outline of it.

Nursery Rhyme

- Aimé Césaire

It is this fine film on the swirls of the cloudy wine of the sea

It is this great rearing of the horses of the earth

halted at the last moment on a gasp of the chasm

it is this black sand which roughs itself up on the hiccup of the abyss

it is this stubborn serpent's crawling out the shipwreck

this mouthful of stars revomited into a cake of fireflies

this stone on the ocean tugging with its drool

at a trembling hand for passing birds

here Sun and Moon

form the two cleverly engaged toothed wheels

of a Time ferocious in grinding us

Aimé Césaire on the difference between actual and abstract equality in the colonial context

'To prevent the development of all national consciousness in the colonized, the colonizer pushes the colonized to desire an abstract equality. But equality refuses to remain abstract. And what an affair it is when the colonized takes back the word on his own account to demand that it not remain a mere word!'

- Aimé Césaire, Décolonisation pour les Antilles

Cited in Nick Nesbitt's Caribbean Critique: Antillean Critical Theory from Toussaint to Glissant (2013)

From Louverture to Lenin: Aimé Césaire and the Problem of the Postcolonial State

From Louverture to Lenin: Aimé Césaire and the Problem of the Postcolonial State by bunnychow

Tongaat Mall Collapse: The Boomerang Effect

Richard Pithouse, SACSIS

In 1961 Frantz Fanon described the colonial world as “cut in two”, divided into “compartments .... inhabited by different species”. For Fanon the creation of different kinds of spaces was central to the creation of different types of people and their ordering in a hierarchy of value. He concluded that the ordering of the colonial world must be examined to “reveal the lines of force it implies”, lines of force that “will allow us to mark out the lines on which a decolonized society will be reorganized”.

The Assumption of Negritude: Aime Cesaire, Frantz Fanon,and the Vicious Circle of Racial Politics

Bernasconi - The Assumption of Negritude - Aime Cesaire, Frantz Fanon, And the Vicious Circle of R

A response to Aime Cesaire’s 'Discourse on Colonialism'

by Himal Ramji

Aime Cesaire’s Discourse on Colonialism, first published in 1955, reads as a passionate and scathing piece of prose, laying heavy but warranted criticism on Europe, the oppressive classes and those who continue to allow such oppression to continue. While being written around 1955 specifically about colonialism, it bears many explicit and metaphorical statements which can be applied to our situation today both in terms of racial struggles as well as struggles against capitalism and imperialism. While all these struggles are intimately intertwined, it is important not to conflate them, emptying each of their specificity.  

Out of Defeat: Aimé Césaire’s miraculous word

by Colin Dayan, Boston Review, 2008

When Aimé Césaire died in Fort-de-France, Martinique on April 17, 2008, Ségolène Royal and others called for him to be buried in the Panthéon in Paris, alongside Rousseau, Hugo, and Zola. Away from the land of his ancestors, the acclaimed poet and long-time mayor of Martinique’s capital Fort-de-France could be claimed for France. But the obituaries make clear that Césaire’s legacy is both powerful and troubling.

Aimé Césaire: Three Poems Newly Translated

Translation from the French by Clayton Eshleman & A. James Arnold, Poems & Poetics

TO THE SERPENT

I have had occasion in the bewilderment of cities to search for the right animal to adore. So I worked my way back to the first times. Undoing cycles untying knots crushing plots removing covers killing hostages I searched.

Discours sur le Colonialisme

Robin Kelley Remembers Aimé Césaire

Excerpt from Aimé Césaire's 'Return to My Native Land'

At the end of the small hours: life flat on its face, miscarried dreams and nowhere to put them, the river of life listless in its hopeless bed, not rising nor falling, unsure of its flow, lamentably empty, the heavy impartial shadow of boredom creeping over the brightness of a single bird.

Aimé Fernand Césaire 1913–2008

A short biography from The Poetry Foundation

Martinican author Aimé Césaire is not only responsible for Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (first published in Spanish 1942; original French version 1947; translated as Memorandum on My Martinique, 1947), a widely acknowledged masterpiece documenting the twentieth-century colonial condition, but he is also an accomplished playwright. Like his poetry and polemical essays, Césaire's plays explore the paradox of black identity under French colonial rule. Césaire's shift to drama in the late 1950s and 1960s allowed him to integrate the modernist and Surrealist techniques of his poetry and the polemics of his prose. In what Césaire describes as his "triptych" of plays, La Tragédie du roi Christophe (published 1963, produced 1964; translated as The Tragedy of King Christophe, 1970), Une Saison au Congo (published 1965; translated as A Season in the Congo, 1968; produced 1976), and Une Tempête (published and produced 1969; translated as A Tempest, 1985), he explores a series of related themes, especially the efforts of blacks—whether in Africa, the United States, or the Caribbean—to resist the powers of colonial domination.

Aimé Césaire's Discourse on Colonialism: A Poetics of Anticolonialism

This essay is an introduction to Aimé Césaire's Discourse on Colonialism. The full text of Discourse on Colonialism is online here.

A Poetics of Anticolonialism

by Robin D.G. Kelley, Monthly Review, 1999

Aimé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism might be best described as a declaration of war. I would almost call it a “third world manifesto,” but hesitate because it is primarily a polemic against the old order bereft of the kind of propositions and proposals that generally accompany manifestos. Yet, Discourse speaks in revolutionary cadences, capturing the spirit of its age just as Marx and Engels did 102 years earlier in their little manifesto.

Aimé Césaire, Bien Aimé de l’Humanité,

Jacques Depelchin, Ota Benga

Aimé Césaire, Bien Aimé de l’Humanité,
Mal Aimé des dirigeants politiques de l’Afrique

Après avoir parlé haut, fort, inlassablement pour l’émancipation de l’humanité, Aimé Césaire s’est éteint sans pouvoir être témoin de ce qu’il était en droit d’espérer après avoir tant essayé de guérir de ce qu’il avait décrit de mille et une façons, et que ses vers suivant (extrait du Calendrier Lagunaire dans Moi, Laminaire, 1982) résument admirablement:

J’habite une blessure sacrée
J’habite des ancêtres imaginaires
J’habite un vouloir obscur

Frantz Fanon: Our Contemporary Zeitgeist

by Ntongela Masilela, Berlin, 1986

The death of Frantz Fanon on December 6th, 1961, at the relatively young age of 36, which today here in Berlin gives us the occasion to commemorate its passage 25 years ago, was felt in many European, American and African intellectual and progressive circles to have been an event of great importance in African intellectual history. In a Presence Africaine issue of 1962, in a section devoted to homages concerning Fanon, Aime Cesaire, the great Martiniquan poet and Fanon's mentor, eulogised him as the theoretician of revolutionary action and of the process of decolonisation. Kwame Nkrumah, then the President of Ghana and the living embodiment of the Pan-Africanist philosophy, in the same review, characterised Fanon as the liberator and emancipator of Africa, whose ultimate aim was to bring about the unification of Africa. Jean-Paul Sartre, the French exponent of Existentialist philosophy, then in the process of attempting to forge a synthesis between Existentialism and Marxism in his colossal but digressive book, Critique of Dialectical Reason, published in 1960, in a preface to Cesaire's play of 1966 Une saison au Congo about the tragic Congo events of 1960, wrote that both Lumumba and Fanon were great men who died at the same age and in the same year; their different historical visions and political praxes represented that which was pre-eminently the best in human culture and civilization.

Aimé Césaire

by Mabogo Percy More, Hydrarchy

We the living shoulder the historical responsibility of ensuring that the deeds and words of the dead should not fade into oblivion unnoticed. Since the dead (ancestors) will always be there, confronting us directly or far off on the horizons of our being, our duty requires that we accept this responsibility with a clear consciousness. The death of Aimé Césaire - the Martinican poet, politician and revolutionary - last week calls on us to carry out the responsibility that we owe the dead.

Retour de Lumumba au pays natal

Jacques Depelchin, Ota Benga

Bienvenu à toutes et à tous, Congolaises, Congolais, de naissance et de cœur, gens de partout, membres de l’humanité. Ce à quoi nous vous invitons n’est pas un tribunal et ne peut pas être comparé à un tribunal. Il s’agit d’une recherche de réponse aux questions posées et non posées qui peuvent être résumées à celle-ci : Comment un peuple dont les valeurs ancestrales étaient fondées sur l’inverse de celles implantées par l’esclavage, la colonisation, la globalisation a été amené à commettre une lente mort contre lui-même, une lente mort aujourd’hui non encore arrêtée, une lente mort qui est passée par des assassinats, des tortures, de filles et de fils dont le mal avait été précisément d’être resté fidèle aux valeurs de solidarité de l’humanité. Il s’agit d’une fidélité venant de très loin comme nous ont rappelé Cheikh Anta Diop, Théophile Obenga, Ayi Kwei Armah et tant d’autres.

Aimé Césaire's Letter of Resignation from the French Communist Party (1956)

Aimé Césaire
Député for Martinique
To: Maurice Thorez
General Secretary of the French Communist Party

It would be easy for me to articulate, as much with respect to the French Communist Party as with respect to the Communist International as sponsored by the Soviet Union, a long list of grievances or disagreements.