Rereading Aimé Césaire:

Negritude as Creolization
Souleymane Bachir Diagne

It is time that we reread Negritude literature afresh, and our celebration of Aimé Césaire’s cen-
tenary offers an excellent opportunity to start that conversation. But against what reading of
its meaning and significance should we then reconsider and reevaluate Negritude literature, or
more precisely, the theoretical/philosophical component of that literature? I would say against
a widely established understanding that it is simply a counteressentialism. In other words,
Negritude is generally presented as a discourse essentializing blackness by being a mere
reversal of the colonial discourse that essentialized blackness as the other. So the gesture
of appropriating the very word nègre, by which racist colonialism used to call black people
(the word négritude was coined by Césaire as a permanent provocation, although he said, as
did the other protagonists of the Negritude movement, that he did not like it), also meant the
acceptance and adoption of colonial ethnological characterization of the “primitive” as non-
logical in contrast to the rational European. Any time Negritude is evoked, we recall Léopold
Sédar Senghor’s infamous formulation, obviously crafted to be a sharp chiasm in the form
of an alexandrine in French—“Emotion is ‘nègre’ as reason is Hellenic”—as an illustration of
misguided counteressentialism. And so are the well-known verses from Césaire’s Notebook
of a Return to the Native Land:

Those who have invented neither powder nor the compass

Those who have tamed neither gas nor electricity
Those who have explored neither the seas nor the skies

small axe 48 • November 2015 • DOI 10.1215/07990537–3341717 © Small Axe, Inc.

122 | Rereading Aimé Césaire: Negritude as Creolization

...
But they abandon themselves, possessed, to the essence of all things
Ignoring surfaces but possessed by the movement of all things
Heedless, taking no account, but playing the game of the world.
Truly the elder sons of the world
Porous to every breath of the world
Flesh of the flesh of the world throbbing with the very movement of the
world.1

It is true without doubt that the language of Negritude is mainly, especially in the early
writings of Senghor, Césaire, and Léon-Gontran Damas, essentialist, but it is also true that it
is not always so and that the essentializing is very much in the reading of Negritude that was
established in the early stage of the movement. Jean-Paul Sartre is greatly responsible for
that essentializing reading. The French philosopher achieved two things with his 1948 “Black
Orpheus,” the preface he wrote to Senghor’s Anthology of New Black and Malagasy Poetry
in French.2 First of all, “Black Orpheus” turned a poetic anthology into a manifesto and made
it the proclamation to the world of Negritude as a response to colonialism and the racism on
which it was founded. Sartre very eloquently, and at moments poetically, read and praised
the verses of the creators gathered by Senghor in his Anthology as the revolutionary poetry
of our times and the incandescent expression of a political, but first and foremost ontological,
insurrection against the radical negation that white supremacy represents. Sartre presented
Negritude as the insurgency of black subjectivity, as the poetic voice of black emancipation.
He also ended his preface in an orthodox Hegelian-Marxist way, reminding everyone that
ultimately, on the stage of universal history, emancipation will happen through the agency
of the universal class that is the proletariat of the industrial nations. The revolt of black par-
ticularism created poetry; the revolution by the proletariat would alone create a new world of
freedom for all.
Presenting Negritude the way he did, and this is the second result “Black Orpheus”
achieved, Sartre established a tradition of reading that poetic, political, and philosophical
movement precisely not as a movement but as an essence. Negritude, according to Sartre,
who labeled it an “antiracist racism,” was once and forever the understandably essentialist
and racialist answer to colonial essentialization, othering, and racism.3
Negritude needs to be reevaluated outside that essentializing reading, which does not
take fully into account the fact that the movement was in its inception when “Black Orpheus”
was written and has unfolded during a seventy-year period: it is not an essence that was pro-
duced the way the goddess Athena came from Zeus’s head, totally achieved and equipped.

1 Aimé Césaire, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, in The Collected Poetry of Aimé Césaire, trans. Clayton Eshelman
and Annette Smith (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 67.
2 Jean-Paul Sartre, “Orphée noire,” preface to Léopold Sédar Senghor, ed., Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et
malgache de langue française (Paris: PUF, 1948), i–xliv.
3 Ibid., xiv.
 48 • November 2015 • Souleymane Bachir Diagne | 123

When “Black Orpheus” was written as an explication of the very philosophical meaning
of Negritude, what was the literature on which Sartre’s articulation of its significance was
expressed? In other words, what essays had already been written on Negritude by Senghor,
Césaire, or Damas? Damas had gotten a little funding to do ethnographical fieldwork in French
Guiana but ended up writing instead an essay titled “Return from Guiana,” published in 1938.
In that essay and in a subsequent article, “Black Misery,” published the following year, he
denounced racism, the colonial situation in Guiana, the ideology of assimilation, proposing
instead genuine association. Earlier, in 1937, his collection of poems Pigments had been
published. Césaire had begun working on his Notebook in 1936; a first version came out in
1939, a second one in 1947. His collection of poems Miraculous Weapons came out in 1946.
In 1948, when Sartre wrote “Black Orpheus,” Césaire’s important work, the Discourse on
Colonialism, was still to come: it would be published in 1950. At the time, Senghor too had
published two collections of poems, with many of the poems written while he was a prisoner
of war in a German camp: Chants d’ombre (Shadow Songs, 1945) and Hosties noires (Black
Hosts, 1948). The only essay he had written on the philosophy of Negritude was “Ce que
l’homme noir apporte” (“What the Black Man Contributes”), published in 1939. Before that,
he had given an important conference in 1937 in Dakar, but the text would not be published
before the early 1960s, in the first volume of his series of collected essays titled Liberté.
In other words, when Sartre proposed to reveal to the world what Negritude was in
essence and to say the final word on its significance, the movement and its literature were
still in a phase of inception. It is paradoxical and ironic that the philosopher of existence that
Sartre was, decided in 1948 what the essence of Negritude consisted of, while the movement
had still to develop its existence. Senghor did respond to his many critics (especially those
who reduced Negritude to the formula written in the beginning, in 1939) using that same
word when he declared: “Negritude is an existence.” In a long letter dated 8 October 1970,
addressed to his American biographer Janet Vaillant, Senghor wrote that Negritude “is not an
essence” but “a phenomenon,” in the sense, he clarified, in which Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
uses the word; Senghor added, “If you prefer, in the Sartrean sense of the word, an existence.”
“Phenomenon,” in the Teilhardian cosmology at the center of Senghor’s philosophy, evokes a
continuously emerging process, and the rapprochement made here with Sartre’s “existence”
is a way of insisting on the fact that the Negritude movement open-endedly invented itself
through reformulations and reappraisals of its initial statements, through palinodes, repreci-
sions, contradictions. Again, Senghor declared to Vaillant, who pointed to his contradictions
that life itself is contradictions and that only in old age does one start to see contradictions
come together in a “symbiosis.”4 It is worth emphasizing that the Senegalese thinker who

4 The letter is included in the French translation of Vaillant’s biography. Janet G. Vaillant, Vie de Léopold Sédar Senghor: Noir,
français et africain, trans. Roger Miller (Paris: Karthala, 2006), 427, 426.
124 | Rereading Aimé Césaire: Negritude as Creolization

knew the weight of words did not speak here of a synthesis, a concept that could evoke the
mechanical result of some dialectical superseding, but of a living symbiosis.
The rereading I am calling for here would avoid petrifying the contradictory movement
of Negritude by flattening it on too-well-known decontextualized formulas such as “emo-
tion is black as reason is Hellenic.” Again, this is not to say that the language of Negritude
is not, often, essentialist. But what needs to be added is, then, that its essentialism is also
permanently self-deconstructing.5
Césaire is often said to have adopted a philosophy of Negritude less essentialist than
Senghor’s. Thus Patrick Chamoiseau, Raphaël Confiant, and Jean Bernabé, in their 1989
manifesto In Praise of Creoleness, called for a reading of Césaire without the lenses of Negri-
tude. In Césaire’s attachment to Senghor’s Africa as the location of his identity, he has been an
“ante-creole” rather than an “anti-creole,” those authors wrote, thus claiming as a precursor a
Césaire without an unfortunate identification with Africa as the meaning of Negritude.6 “Negro
I am, Negro I will remain”—Césaire’s declaration to Françoise Vergès, which became the title
of the book she published of her interview with the Martinican poet—clearly resonates as his
response to the creolists.7 I will read that declaration as both a word of opposition and a word
of fidelity: opposition to the creoleness claim and fidelity to the movement (not the essence)
in which he has been engaged all his life.

Nègre je resterai against Negation

Aimé Césaire mostly avoided voicing an open opposition to the creolist authors, who in turn
have insisted that they were an integral part of his legacy and forever his “heirs.” What does
it mean, exactly, to be an “heir,” and how do the creolists constitute the “legacy” in the first
place? Is it to say that after the colonial “moment” of the father, “Papa Césaire,” came the
postcolonial true understanding of the heirs? In Praise of Creoleness, with its opening as a
succession of negations (“Neither Europeans, nor Africans, nor Asians . . .”) was certainly
written from such a posture.8 In a 2009 article, Faitha Boulafrad and Mohamed Rafic Bena-
ouda, reflecting on Césaire’s interview with Vergès, rightly affirm that the simplistic view of
an essentialist albeit necessary moment called Negritude, followed by the full consciousness
of creoleness, hybridity, and mixture, does not do justice to what Césaire’s Negritude (and,
indeed, Senghor’s as well) stands for:

5 In my book on Senghor’s philosophy, I make a comparison with Penelope undoing at night what she weaved during the
day. See Souleymane Bachir Diagne, African Art as Philosophy: Senghor, Bergson, and the Idea of Negritude (London:
Seagull, 2011).
6 Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant, Eloge de la créolité / In Praise of Creoleness, trans. M. B. Taleb-
Khyar (Paris: Gallimard, 1993), 18/80.
7 Aimé Césaire, Nègre je suis, nègre je resterai: Entretiens avec Françoise Vergès (Paris: Albin Michel, 2005).
8 Bernabé, Chamoiseau, and Confiant, Eloge/Praise, 13/75.
 48 • November 2015 • Souleymane Bachir Diagne | 125

How can [Césaire] be accused of having valorized only African cultures while he has always
called for an openness to all cultures and civilizations in the world in order to realize the cross-
breeding of cultures that the partisans of creolenness talk about? As a matter of fact, Césaire
did not spare his energy and his eloquence advocating a dialogue between world civilizations in
order to end any form of savagery and oppression. And he did tell Françoise Vergès that such
a dialogue can only be started through politics and culture.9

This observation that Negritude is as much about mixture as it is about blackness is but
the simple recognition of what the discourse of Negritude, over the course of its unfolding, has
been. Chamoiseau explains in his interview with Luigia Pattano that it was his coauthor Confi-
ant who decided to go for the concept of créolité (creoleness).10 By choosing to turn créole into
the substantive créolité, notes Chamoiseau, Confiant was transforming his militancy for the
Creole language into a quest for identity. Ultimately, and not so paradoxically, the succession
of resounding negations (“Neither Europeans, nor Africans, nor Asians . . .”) setting the tone
of the Praise only ends in the affirmation and the proclamation of some new exceptionalism:
that of a Caribbean identity defined by its opposition to what Edouard Glissant has called ata-
vistic cultures, that is, cultures dominated by the model of the tree holding by its roots versus
cultures that are rootless and rhizomatic. After all, one might ask, what is wrong with being
European, African, or Asian if what is considered is the sheer de facto situation of being from
a continent instead of an archipelago? Superseding identity and embracing crossbreeding
should not be simply about location and historical situation. Again, Senghor said it eloquently
in the title he gave to a speech praising the work of Franco-Senegalese philosopher Gaston
Berger: “Everybody Must Be Mixed in Her Own Way.”11 Métissage (miscegenation) is not an
accident; it is not about what is or what happens but what ought to be, what it is a duty for
everyone to make happen. This is the notion of crossbreeding that Senghor and Césaire’s
Negritude is built on.
Yet it is not simply about making cultures and civilizations enter a dialogue because that
could still mean, after all, that those cultures are insularities isolated from one another, each
enclosed within its own unique being: such an encounter of essences is still an essentialism.

9 Fatiha Boulafrad and Mohamed Rafik Benaouda, “Nègre je suis, nègre je resterai: La deuxième confession d’un homme
constaté et contesté,” Synergies Algérie 5 (2009): 255, gerflint.fr/Base/Algerie5/boulafrad.pdf (translation mine).
10 To the question “So the word ‘creoleness’ comes from Confiant,” Chamoiseau answers, “Yes, he is the one who introduced
it. Confiant was a militant for Creole, which I was not. For a long time, he worked for the Creole language. He ran a journal
in Creole and he had already written, I believe, a charter for creoleness but that was from a linguistic perspective while with
Glissant we rather have the question of creolization which is not just linguistic. So Confiant called ‘creoleness’ something
that became an exploration of identity. But at the beginning in his life as a militant, creoleness was for Confiant a linguistic
question. He expanded it toward the question of identity. Hence creoleness, creolization, etc.” Patrick Chamoiseau,
interview by Luigia Pattano, 5 January 2011, Fort-de-France, mondesfrancophones.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09
/Entretien_avec_Patrick_Chamoiseau_version_PDF.pdf, 3.
11 Léopold Sédar Senghor, “Chacun doit être métis à sa façon ou l’université Gaston Berger,” in Liberté 5: Le dialogue des
cultures (Paris: Seuil, 1993), 46–52. Senghor’s speech is a good illustration of the contradictions inherent to Negritude. On
the one hand, Senghor celebrates the actual biological métissage of Berger in a clearly essentialist language; on the other
hand, and in accordance with the very title of the text, the meaning of métissage is said to be not only cultural but ethical.
126 | Rereading Aimé Césaire: Negritude as Creolization

On the contrary, what the duty of métissage, or métissage as a duty, truly means is that every
human culture is internally open to its continuous hybridization.
During the 1966 Festival Mondial des Arts Nègres organized by his friend Senghor in
Dakar, Césaire delivered his very important “Lecture on African Art.”12 He first emphasized in
his speech the need for art and poetry in which the world in general found itself as it faces
dehumanization and reification. He then focused on Africa, identifying what he considered
the two main dangers facing African artistic creativity. The first was for African artists to think
that they should imitate European art and thus loose the energy and creative force generated
by their situation and experience. The second danger, which represented an even worse case
of mimesis, he stated, was self-mimesis: trying to copy and repeat what is established as an
identity of “African art” would be the worst that could happen to African creativity, a death by
petrifaction through endless repetition of the same. African art, he insisted, had to remain a life
force continuously open to its own transformation. In other words, the meaning of African art is
given by its unpredictable future, not by its past, and it depends, says Césaire, on the vitality
of the culture but also on the economy and the politics. Indeed, in the vision for African art
thus developed, we can read what Césaire meant, against any form of essentialism, when he
categorically refused in his letter to Maurice Thorez, written ten years earlier, an incarcerating
conception of identity.13
Chamoiseau, in his interview with Pattano, explains that he understands why Césaire,
ultimately, was so skeptical about the claim of a creole exceptionalism built on negations:

[Césaire] said that creoleness was fine, but it was only a subset of Negritude while I think that
it is the other way around. But he always remained distant from it. I think he never really paid
attention to the question because Césaire experienced what could be called the “mulatto
pollution.” The mulatto, generally speaking, would acknowledge being a métis, the mixture of
white and black of which he is constituted, but that would be in order to get closer to the white
and get rid of Africa. It is a way of saying: “I am mixed, so I have nothing to do with blacks.”
And in Césaire’s mind, any talk of creolization, mixture, identity complexity, would have been
a way—this is my interpretation—of distancing oneself from Africa, of downplaying the African
dimension. So I think Césaire suspected us of “mulattization.”14

The title of Césaire’s interview/book—Nègre je suis, nègre je resterai—which certainly

sounds like a testament, does imply that he saw the negations upon which the Praise of
Creoleness constituted itself as a way of negating ultimately the relationship with Africa, or
at least its importance.

12 Aimé Césaire, “Discours sur l’art africain,” in Aimé Césaire: Poésie, théâtre, essais et discours, ed. Albert James Arnold
(Paris: Planete Libre, 2013), 1562–69.
13 See Aimé Césaire, “Letter to Maurice Thorez,” trans. Chike Jeffers, Social Text, no. 103 (Summer 2010): 145–52.
14 Chamoiseau, interview, 4.
 48 • November 2015 • Souleymane Bachir Diagne | 127

Nègre je resterai as Fidelity

What does fidelity to “being nègre” mean? Césaire often repeats that Negritude is not a meta-
physics, not the claim of an African essence. What nègre stands for is to be understood in
expressions such as “Chercher le nègre en nous” (Look for the Negro in us), the nègre “fonda-
mental.” Arthur Rimbaud too was looking for the “nègre fondamental,” that is, in the language
of Gilles Deleuze, a “ligne de fuite” (line of flight). Rimbaud’s “je suis nègre” often cited by
Senghor meant “I am out of here”: “Yes, I close my eyes against your light. I am an animal, a
Negro . . . The cleverest thing to do is to leave this continent, where madness roams, searching
out hostages for this dismal bunch. I am entering the true kingdom of the children of Ham.”15
What about “Creole” as language? The reproach has been directed at Césaire that he
never celebrates in his writing the language of the people, preferring to create in the Frenchest
French. Senghor has often faced the same criticism, and his praise of the French language
has mercilessly been maligned as the ultimate surrender to colonialism, explaining his crucial
role in the creation of Francophonie, considered by some a neocolonial institution. Two points
will be made here in connection to that criticism.
The first is that the praise by a poet (and both Senghor and Césaire are arguably among
the best poets in the French language of the twentieth century) of the language in which he
creates his or her oeuvre should be expected. Why consider that there is anything wrong in
the celebration by a writer of the language to which every word he writes is a declaration of
love? But the point is also to say that such a love goes perfectly well with the will to also
promote the “endogenous” languages as languages of creation and science as well. Senghor,
for example, as early as 1937, had expressed the ideal of what he called bilingualism, claim-
ing that the future called for citizens who would live fully in French and in Bamana, Sereer, or
Wolof, all those languages having the same value, dignity, and capacity to express modern
sciences and literary creation.16
The second point is more precisely about understanding the aesthetics of Negritude in
connection with language. Sartre devoted an important part of his “Black Orpheus” to the
demonstration that while the poets of Senghor’s Anthology wrote their poetry in French, the
very language of their oppression, they had appropriated it in a unique way that belonged
only to them, inventing, so to say, a French-for-Negritude language. Césaire’s phrase “miracu-
lous weapon” has also been used to express the idea that the weapon that the oppressor’s
language is has been miraculously transformed by the oppressed into the tool of their eman-
cipation. But Césaire has said more and better in a lecture he gave in Geneva in 1978. The
occasion was the celebration of the presentation by Robert Cornman, the American conduc-
tor, of Return, a cantata he had created after the Martinican poet’s Notebook of a Return to

15 Arthur Rimbaud, Collected Poems, trans. Martin Sorrell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 219.
16 See Senghor’s 1937 lecture at the Chamber of Commerce in Dakar, “Le problème culturel en A.O.F.” (“The Cultural
Problem in French West Africa”), in Liberté 1: Négritude et humanisme (Paris: Seuil, 1964), 11–21.
128 | Rereading Aimé Césaire: Negritude as Creolization

the Native Land. Speaking about the relationship of the Negritude poets with French and
literature in French, Césaire declared that the way to describe it is to use the concept coined
by Czech writer Franz Kafka and rearticulated by Deleuze: that of a minor literature. Deleuze,
said Césaire, has perfectly stated that “a minor literature is not that of a minor language but
that of a minority writing in a major language.”17 That situation, he emphasized, is the reality
of Negritude. One implication is then evident: that Negritude is Francophonie is not a neoco-
lonial contradiction.
To characterize the situation of the language of Negritude vis-à-vis French, Césaire also
speaks of its literature as a “pirate literature”: Negritude hijacked French and at the same time
“recharged and energized” it.18 Ultimately, poetry is simply its own language, the language,
says Césaire, of “both nostalgia and prophecy,” which leads to salvation because it is capable
of “recollecting Being and intensifying Life.” This could be read as meaning that poetry is the
“Adamic” pre-Babel language, the language before the plurality of languages, the language
of Being itself. And Césaire emphasizes that the reason Negritude is par excellence poetry
is because the goal of poetry is to give back to the individual who is alienated and negated
what he calls Sahardaya, using the Indian word to mean the “taste” of what one is, and the
sense of a “reconstituted plenitude.”19
Minor literature, a literature of piracy: this is not about essence but about continuous
hybridization and, yes, creolization.

17 Aimé Césaire, “Genève et le monde noir,” presented at “Geneva and the Black World,” Geneva, 2 June 1978; reproduced
in Annick Thébia-Melsan, ed., Aimé Césaire, pour regarder le siècle en face (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 2000), 27
(translation mine).
18 Ibid., 27, 28.
19 Ibid., 29.