Aimé Césaire

Aimé Césaire coined the word négritude, wrote the poem that defined it, and was mayor of Fort-de-France for fifty-six years. He was born in Martinique to a family of modest means, won a scholarship to the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris, and there met Léopold Sédar Senghor and Léon Damas; the three began a review in which the term appeared, taking a French insult for black people and turning it into a claim. Cahier d'un retour au pays natal, published in 1939, is his central work, a long poem of return and refusal that André Breton called the greatest lyrical monument of the age. Discourse on Colonialism in 1950 argues that colonial violence brutalises the coloniser and that Europe had practised on others what it was shocked by when Hitler practised it on Europeans. He was elected deputy for Martinique and mayor of the capital in 1945, and was the architect of the 1946 law that made the old colonies French departments - a position he later regarded with some ambivalence but never repudiated. He resigned from the Communist Party in 1956 in an open letter to Maurice Thorez over the party's handling of Stalinism and of colonial questions. Frantz Fanon was his pupil at the lycée. He was given a state funeral. Une Tempete, his 1969 rewriting of Shakespeare, makes Caliban a colonised man who refuses the name he was given, and Une saison au Congo dramatises the killing of Patrice Lumumba. He refused to receive Nicolas Sarkozy in Martinique in 2005 in protest at a French law requiring schools to teach the positive role of colonisation, and received him after the article was repealed. Fort-de-France re-elected him without interruption from 1945 to 2001. The island's airport carries his name. Younger Caribbean writers, Edouard Glissant among them, argued that negritude fixed black identity too firmly, and made their own work partly in argument with him.

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