Aime Cesaire
Aime Cesaire
Aimé Fernand David Césairewas a Francophone and French poet, author and politician from Martinique. He was "one of the founders of the négritude movement in Francophone literature". He wrote such works as Une Tempête, a response to Shakespeare's play The Tempest, and Discours sur le colonialisme, an essay describing the strife between the colonizers and the colonized. His works have been translated into many languages...
NationalityFrench
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth26 June 1913
CountryFrance
I would rediscover the secret of great communications and great combustions. I would say storm. I would say river. I would say tornado. I would say leaf. I would say tree. I would be drenched by all rains, moistened by all dews. I would roll like frenetic blood on the slow current of the eye of words turned into mad horses into fresh children into clots into curfew into vestiges of temples into precious stones remote enough to discourage miners. Whoever would not understand me would not understand any better the roaring of a tiger.
Reason, I sacrifice you to the evening breeze.
A man screaming is not a dancing bear. Life is not a spectacle.
The weakness of most men they do not know how to become a stone or tree.
I have a different idea of a universal. It is of a universal rich with all that is particular, rich with all the particulars there are, the deepening of each particular, the coexistence of them all.
Poetic knowledge is born in the great silence of scientific knowledge.
Beware, my body and my soul, beware above all of crossing your arms and assuming the sterile attitude of the spectator, for life is not a spectacle, a sea of griefs is not a proscenium, and a man who wails is not a dancing bear.
Culture is everything. Culture is the way we dress, the way we carry our heads, the way we walk, the way we tie our ties - it is not only the fact of writing books or building houses.
It is no use painting the foot of the tree white, the strength of the bark cries out from beneath the paint.
When I turn on my radio, when I hear that Negroes have been lynched in America, I say that we have been lied to: Hitler is not dead; when I turn on my radio, when I hear that Jews have been insulted, mistreated, persecuted, I say that we have been lied to: Hitler is not dead; when, finally, I turn on my radio and hear that in Africa forced labor has been inaugurated and legalized, I say that we have certainly been lied to: Hitler is not dead.
And let me die suddenly, to be born again in the revelation of beauty....And the revelation of beauty is the wisdom of the ancestors.
I am talking about societies drained of their essence, cultures trampled underfoot, institutions undermined, lands confiscated, religions smashed, magnificent artistic creations destroyed, extraordinary possibilities wiped out.
There's room for everyone at the rendezvous of victory.
In the whole world no poor devil is lynched, no wretch is tortured, in whom I too am not degraded and murdered.