Aimé Césaire

Robin D. G. Kelley

Joan Pinkham

"This classic work, first published in France in 1955, profoundly influenced the generation of scholars and activists at the forefront of liberation struggles in Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean. Nearly twenty years later, when published for the first time in English, Discourse on Colonialism inspired a new generation engaged in the Civil Rights, Black Power and antiwar movements."--

Discourse on Colonialism

Aimé Césaire's masterpiece, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, is a work of immense cultural significance and beauty. The long poem was the beginning of Césaire's quest for négritude, and it became an anthem of Blacks around the world. With its emphasis on unusual juxtapositions of object and metaphor, manipulation of language into puns and neologisms, and rhythm, Césaire considered his style a "beneficial madness" that could "break into the forbidden" and reach the powerful and overlooked aspects of black culture.

Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith achieve a laudable adaptation of Césaire's work to English by clarifying double meanings, stretching syntax, and finding equivalent English puns, all while remaining remarkably true to the French text. Their treatment of the poetry is marked with imagination, vigor, and accuracy that will clarify difficulties for those already familiar with French, and make the work accessible to those who are not. André Breton's introduction, A Great Black Poet, situates the text and provides a moving tribute to Césaire.

Notebook of a Return to the Native Land is recommended for readers in comparative literature, post-colonial literature, African American studies, poetry, modernism, and French.

Notebook of a Return to the Native Land

Richard Miller

Based on Shakespeare's The Tempest, Adaptation for a Black Theatre

A Tempest

The surrealist poetry of the noted Martinican author, Aime Cesaire, portrays Africa's fight for freedom from colonialism

The Collected Poetry

A revolutionary artist and lifelong political activist, Césaire's forceful opposition to imperialism, racism and the assimilation of Western culture among non-Western people has exerted a profound influence on contemporary world literature. In his play, A Season in the Congo, he recounts the betrayal and assassination of the much-loved Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister of the Congo Republic and an African nationalist hero. The play recounts how Lumumba helped overthrow colonialist Belgian rule and brought independence to the Congo. A deeply moving and enthralling work.

A Season in the Congo

A series of ten poems by the Caribbean author explores the nature of the Black culture

Corps Perdu

Malcolm X

Black Revolution

" Et nous sommes debout maintenant, mon pays et moi, les cheveux dans le vent, ma main petite maintenant dans son poing énorme et la force n'est pas en nous, mais au-dessus de nous, dans une voix qui vrille la nuit et l'audience comme la pénétrance d'une guêpe apocalyptique. Et la voix prononce que l'Europe nous a pendant des siècles gavés de mensonges et gonflés de pestilences, car il n'est point vrai que l'œuvre de l'homme est finie, que nous n'avons rien à faire au monde, que nous parasitons le monde mais l'œuvre de l'homme vient seulement de commencer et il reste à l'homme à conquérir toute interdiction immobilisée aux coins de sa ferveur et aucune race ne possède le monopole de la beauté, de l'intelligence, de la force et il est place pour tous au rendez-vous de la conquête et nous savons maintenant que le soleil tourne autour de notre terre éclairant la parcelle qu'a fixée notre volonté seule et que toute étoile chute de ciel en terre à notre commandement sans limite ". La réédition du Cahier d'un retour au pays natal, la première œuvre d'Aimé Césaire, saluée depuis l'origine comme le texte fondamental de la génération de la Négritude.

Cahier d'un retour au pays natal

LA Tragedie Du Roi Christophe

Ce volume se compose du recueil Ferrements (1960) et d'un ensemble parcourant un demi-siècle de poésie. On y retrouve toute la force de la « parole essentielle » de Césaire : une poésie où le lyrisme vient conjurer l'informe, où l'imaginaire des Antilles, la sensualité des images, la flambée des mots rebelles éclairent les rêves et les angoisses d'un nouveau monde à forger.

poésie

Ferrements et autres poèmes

Et les chiens se taisaient

Une saison au congo

Le discours sur la negritude, Miami 1987

Return to My Native Land

Clayton Eshleman

A. James Arnold

The only bilingual edition of this radically original collection

The Unexpurgated 1948 Edition

Solar Throat Slashed

The twenty poems in this book, presented in French with facing English translations, have been chosen to illustrate fundamental aspects of Cesaire's thought, imagery, and style as these crystallized into a single, coherent system in the late 1940's and the 1950's. The work aims to assist both nonspecialist reader and scholar to a deeper comprehension of the poems and their formidable linguistic difficulties.

Non-Vicious Circle

A work of immense cultural significance and beauty, this long poem became an anthem for the African diaspora and the birth of the Negritude movement. With unusual juxtapositions of object and metaphor, a bouquet of language-play, and deeply resonant rhythms, Césaire considered this work a "break into the forbidden," at once a cry of rebellion and a celebration of black identity. More praise: "The greatest living poet in the French language."--American Book Review "Martinique poet Aime Cesaire is one of the few pure surrealists alive today. By this I mean that his work has never compromised its wild universe of double meanings, stretched syntax, and unexpected imagery. This long poem was written at the end of World War II and became an anthem for many blacks around the world. Eshleman and Smith have revised their original 1983 translations and given it additional power by presenting Cesaire's unique voice as testament to a world reduced in size by catastrophic events." --Bloomsbury Review "Through his universal call for the respect of human dignity, consciousness and responsibility, he will remain a symbol of hope for all oppressed peoples." --Nicolas Sarkozy "Evocative and thoughtful, touching on human aspiration far beyond the scale of its specific concerns with Cesaire's native land - Martinique." --The Times

Return to my Native Land

Aime Cesaire has been described by the Times Literary Supplement as likely to "figure alongside the Eliot-Pound-Yeats triumvirate that has dominated official poetic culture for more than fifty years." He was a cofounder and exponent of the concept of negritude and is a major spiritual, political, and literary figure.Cesaire has been read politically as a poet of revolutionary zeal since the 1960s. This collection, the only one in existence in any language to give a truly comprehensive retrospective of Cesaire's poetic production, demonstrates the narrowness of earlier readings that grew out of the climate of Black Power influenced by the essays of Frantz Fanon, another Martinican, who was largely responsible for the ambient view of Csaire a generation ago. It is the first collection to translate And the Dogs Were Silent and i, laminaria. Lyric and Dramatic Poetry, 1946-82 goes beyond anything else in print (in French or in English) in that it locates the issues of Cesaire's struggle with an emerging postmodern vision. It will place Cesaire in a strategic position in the current debate in the U.S. over emergent literature and will show him to be a major figure in the conflict between tradition and contemporary cultural identity.

Lyric and Dramatic Poetry, 1946-82

A play about the life of Patrice Lumumba, from his efforts to free the Congolese from Belgian rule to his assassination in 1961.

Aimé Césaire

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