Cesaire Page

Cesaire

http://www.english.emory.edu/Bahri/Cesaire.html

Aime Cesaire

Biography

Aime Cesaire was born in 1913 in Martinique in the French Caribbean.

He left for Paris in 1931 at the age of 18 with a scholarship for school. During his time at the Lycee Louis-le Grand, he helped found a student publication, Etudiant Noir. In 1936 Cesaire started working on his famed piece "Cahier" which was not published until 1939. He married fellow student Suzanne Roussi in 1937, and the couple moved back to Martinique with their son in 1939. Both Aime and Suzanne got jobs at the Lycee Schoelcher. In 1945 Cesaire began his political career when he was elected mayor of Fort-de-France and deputy in the Constituent Assembly on the French Communist Party ticket. During the 1940s, Cesaire was busy writing and publishing many collections of his work. He seemed to be influenced by art because he wrote a tribute to a painter named Wilfredo Lam and one of his collections has illustrations by Pablo Picasso (Cesaire xxxviii). In 1956 Aime Cesaire resigned from the French Communist Party and two years later he began the "Parti Progressiste Martiniquais." During these years Cesaire attended two conferences for "Negro Writers and Artists" in Paris. In 1968 he published the first version of Une Tempete, "a radical adaptation of Shakespeare's play The Tempest" (Davis xvi). He continued on with his writings of poetry and plays and retired from politics in 1993. All of Cesaire's writings are in French with a limited number having English translations. Poetry

Cesaire's poetry has been described as a style between "artistic 'modernism' and black consciousness" (14). His writing can also be characterized as surreal. Cesaire is closely related to the word "negritude," which signifies the black youth's attempt to maintain a positive racial identity (3). Many of his works combine the two ideas of negritude and surrealism. Surrealism is defined as "a modern movement in art and literature in which an attempt is made to portray or interpret the workings of the unconscious mind as manifested in dreams; it is characterized by an irrational, fantastic, arrangement of materials" (Webster's 1348). Cesaire's poems are usually unrhyming and the style can be challenging. Cesaire's poetry also contains many metaphors which can confuse his readers.

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Drama

Cesaire began to focus on drama with the use of the poem "Chiens." The poem contains different dialogues in it so Cesaire made it into a play. In 1968 he published, Une Tempete, a version of Shakespeare's famous play The Tempest. He wanted to reflect black America in this play but the setting is the Caribbean. Davis argues that "The central paradigm of the colonizer / colonized relation, as it is constructed in The Tempest, embraces the totality of the black experience in the New World"(157). Cesaire wanted to depict Black life in America. Many critics believe Cesaire's version of The Tempest is about the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized and the struggle for absolute power. In the play, Prospero is the master of the two men Caliban and Ariel. Prospero is the colonizer and both Caliban and Ariel attempt to gain their freedom from him. Caliban's approach to freedom is through rebellion while Ariel tries "to appeal to his [Prospero's] moral conscience"(161). In the end, Caliban's rebellion fails when all he wanted was to be his own master. In his final speech, Caliban charges Prospero with lying to him and holding him inferior. It is a classic example of the colonized rejecting the colonizer. This is a quote taken from this final speech by Caliban, Prospero, you are the master of illusion. Lying is your trademark. And you have lied so much to me (lied about the world, lied about me) that you have ended by imposing on me an image of myself. underdeveloped, you brand me, inferior, Thatís the way you have forced me to see myself I detest that image! What's more, it's a lie! But now I know you, you old cancer, and I know myself as well. (162) This final scene in The Tempest shows Cesaire's attitude towards colonization. The colonizer imposes on the colonized all kinds of lies. The colonizer makes the colonized feel unworthy of living. Works by Aime Cesaire Collected Works: Euvres Completes. Vol.1 (Poesie), Vol. 2 (Theatre), Vol. 3 (Euvre historique et politique). Fort-de-France : Editions Desormeaux, 1976. Eshleman, Clayton and Smith, Annette, trans. Aime Cesaire : The Collected Poetry. Berkley: Univ. of CA Press, 1983. Maximin, Daniel and Carpentier, Gilles, eds. La Poesie. Paris : Seuil, 1994. 2 of 4

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Cesaire

http://www.english.emory.edu/Bahri/Cesaire.html

Poetry: Les Armes miraculeuses. Paris : Gallimard, 1946. Soliel cou coupe. Paris : Editions K, 1948. Corps perdu. Paris : Fragrance, 1950. Cahier díun retour au pays natal. Paris : Presence Africaine, 1956. Ferrements. Paris : Seuil, 1960. Cadastre. Paris : Seuil, 1961. Moi, laminaire . . . Paris : Seuil, 1982. Drama: Et les chiens se taisaient. Paris : Presence Africaine, 1956. Une Tempete. Paris : Seuil, 1969. La Tragedie du roi Christophe. Paris : Presence Africaine, 1970. Une Saison au Congo. Paris : Seuil, 1974. Works Cited Cesaire, Aime. Lyric and Dramatic Poetry 1946-82. Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith, trans. Charlottesville : Univ. Press of VA, 1990. Davis, Gregson. Aime Cesaire. United Kingdom : Cambridge Univ. Press, 1997. Neufeldt, Victoria, ed. Webster's New World College Dictionary. New York : Macmillan, 1996.

Author: Brooke Ritz, Spring 1999

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(Image of an "Homme Carrefour" from Donald J. Cosentino's Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou [Los Angeles: UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History, 1995].)

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