A Tempest

At the start of the Introduction, American historian Robin D. G. Kelley identifies the French poet and playwright Aimé Césaire as the founder of Négritude, which is “the first diasporic ‘black pride’ movement” (vii), and a Surrealist. Kelley admires Césaire’s ability to use poetry as a political weapon.

In his brief biography of Césaire, Kelley describes him as a gifted student who grew up in a large family in Martinique. Césaire grew up in near poverty, though his father had received a good education, and in 1931, Césaire moved to Paris to prepare for the entrance exams to a teacher training school. With Léopold Sédar Senghor, a Senegalese poet and intellectual, and the poet Léon-Gontran Damas, Césaire started a publication called L’Étudiant Noir, or The Black Student, in which he first referred to the term “Négritude.”

In 1941, after publishing what would become his most famous poem and marrying another student from Martinique named Suzanne Roussi, Césaire returned home. Together, they launched another journal, Tropiques, and their first issue coincided with the Vichy usurpation of France and its colonies. While under intense political scrutiny, the founders of the journal disguised the anticolonial perspectives in Tropiques as articles about “West Indian folklore” (ix).