France marks 10-year anniversary of death of poet and politician Aimé Césaire

Césaire is considered by some to be the most important Caribbean writer of his generation. Along with intellectuals Léopold Sédar Senghor (who would go on to be the first president of Senegal) and Léon Damas, Césaire was a founding father of negritude, the black consciousness movement that championed pride in African history and culture in response to years of repression and denigration under colonialism.

Born in the French overseas department of Martinique in 1913, Césaire attended French public school in the island’s capital, Fort-de-France. He was steeped in French poetry but also identified strongly with the island’s Creole culture, which was built on the African roots of most of the population.

In 1931, he came to study in Paris and immediately encountered an environment of budding African intellectualism. He joined forces with friends Léon Damas and Senghor to launch the magazine L’Étudiant noir (“The Black Student”). The three young men rejected French policies of assimilation and, instead, celebrated their rich cultural background and African roots.

In 1939, he returned to Martinique. In the pages of Tropiques, the cultural magazine that he edited, he continued to develop the ideas of negritude. His most famous work is "Cahier d’un retour au pays natal" (translated as “Return to My Native Land”), published in 1939.

He continued to write but also went on to enjoy a fruitful political career. He was mayor of Fort-de-France from 1945 until 2001 (except for one brief break). He also served as a deputy in France’s National Assembly, where he championed departmentalisation, the policy by which overseas colonies were integrated into France and given the same rights as departments in metropolitan France. He went on to mentor a new generation of Caribbean writers, including the much more militant Frantz Fanon.

Césaire died on April 17, 2008, aged 95. In accordance with his wishes, his body was buried in Martinique, but on April 6, 2011, his name was inscribed on the Pantheon in Paris.

On the ten-year anniversary of his death, both French Prime Minister Édouard Philippe and Minister of Overseas France Annick Girardin paid homage to Césaire.

“Immense poet (and) fighter, Aimé Césaire gave a universal voice to the history of the French Antilles, the slave trade, slavery and Martinique," the prime minister tweeted. "Ten years after his death, his words still resonate with just as much force."

A ceremony was held in Césaire’s honour on Monday night at the Ministry of Culture. On Tuesday, another ceremony will take place in the National Assembly, during which actor and director Jacques Martial will perform Césaire's famous work, "Cahier d’un retour au pays natal".

(FRANCE 24 with AFP)